Wind/ Pinball: Two Novels

by Haruki Murakami

“People with dark hearts have dark dreams. Those whose hearts are even darker can’t dream at all.”

Ascribing meaning to life is a piece of cake compared to actually living it.

A gulf separates what we attempt to perceive from what we are actually able to perceive. It is so deep that it can never be calculated, however long our measuring stick.

Happened a long time ago. It bugged me at first, but not anymore. A guy can get used to anything.”

“Civilization is communication,” the doctor said. “That which is not expressed doesn’t exist.

Civilization is communication. When that which should be expressed and transmitted is lost, civilization comes to an end. Click … OFF.

“Are you angry with me?” “Why do you ask?” “I said some really mean things. I just wanted to apologize.” “Look, I don’t need your sympathy. If it’s bothering you, go to the park and feed the pigeons.”

“You’re pretty hard on yourself.” “Yes, I try to be.”

“It’s never a good idea to bad-mouth your family,”

The third girl I slept with liked to call my penis my “raison d’être.”

I believed in all seriousness that by converting my life into numbers I might be able to get through to people. That having something to communicate could stand as proof I really existed. Of course, no one had the slightest interest in how many cigarettes I had smoked, or the number of stairs I had climbed, or the size of my penis. When I realized this, I lost my raison d’être and became utterly alone.

There are no truly strong people. Only people who pretend to be strong.”

Lies are terrible things. One could say that the greatest sins afflicting modern society are the proliferation of lies and silence. We lie through our teeth, then swallow our tongues.

All the same, were we to speak only the truth all year round, then the truth might lose its value.

“Why do people die?” “Because of evolution. An individual organism can’t sustain the amount of energy that evolution requires; evolution has to work its way through generations. That’s just one theory, of course.”

All things pass. None of us can manage to hold on to anything. In that way, we live our lives.

How can those who live in the light of day possibly comprehend the depths of night?

we could sense something nasty lurking just out of sight. The Rat felt it like a pebble in his shoe.

if you cling to the belief that the human organism is made to improve itself through some sort of dialectical process, a year as awful as 1970 can teach you something.

2020?

I took a long look at my reflection in the window. My eyes were a bit hollow with fever. I could live with that. And my jaw was dark with five o’clock (five thirty, actually) shadow. I could live with that too. The problem was that the face I saw wasn’t my face at all. It was the face of the twenty-four-year-old guy you sometimes sit across from on the train. My face and my soul were lifeless shells, of no significance to anyone. My soul passes someone else’s on the street. Hey, it says. Hey, the other responds. Nothing more. Neither waves. Neither looks back.

Each day was a carbon copy of the last. You needed a bookmark to tell one from the other.

“Well, it doesn’t make sense to me.” “That’s the best way to handle it. Admit that you don’t understand and leave it at that.”

could tell he regretted not having an overhead projector and a long pointer.

“Why? This world is rife with matters philosophy cannot explain.”

“There can be no meaning in what will someday be lost. Passing glory is not true glory at all.”

Tennessee Williams once wrote: “So much for the past and present. The future is called ‘perhaps,’ which is the only possible thing to call the future.”