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There must be something, I didn’t know what, but something on this planet that only I was meant to accomplish.
It was then that the realization of the utter hopelessness of my situation finally caught up with me.
The real devil doesn’t have a scary red face or a pointy tail, and there’s no pitchfork in sight! The devil looks just like you. So I guess the real doppelgänger is the devil!
“Well, I mean, sure, a lot of people do it and proclaim they’ll check every last item off of their bucket list … You know the kind, right? It’s a phase that everyone goes through at least once.
During a torrential rainstorm, run for shelter under the same awning as the girl I had a crush on in school.
I’d cuddled up with the little guy countless times over the years without thinking much about it, but now, for the first time ever, it occurred to me that maybe this little act of comfort was what life was all about.
“In order to gain something, you have to lose something.”
“All you have to do is remove one thing from the world, and in return, you’ll get one more day of life.”
There was just one thing they weren’t allowed to do—to eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. That’s where the apple comes in … the forbidden fruit.”
They started using all their time to make all sorts of newfangled objects—you know, all those little doodads you’re not sure you really need.
The world is basically drowning in crap anyways. All those small, silly, useless things like the parsley they put on an omelet, or the promotional flyers they’re always sticking on your windshield.
I mean, just take a look at what I do for a living: I’m a postman. Pretty soon, postmen will be extinct because no one writes letters or postcards anymore—we’re
people would probably just get right to work on coming up with a new kind of sweet thing to replace chocolate. It just goes to show how insatiable we humans can be when it comes to food.
As I watched him, I realized that for the most part we just call cat food “cat food.” But humans, we’re not satisfied with calling all our food “human food.” No, we’re much fussier than that. We need names for all of our different meals.
But when death stares you in the face, you find yourself willing to accept a helping hand from anyone, even the devil, in order to stay alive. It’s basic human instinct.
“Yes! Let’s get rid of it,” he cried ecstatically. “What do you think? One day of life in exchange for your phone.”
I’m sure we would still get along great. But on the other hand, we never really had any deep, meaningful, or serious conversations.
Countless people with whom I seemed to have had some kind of a relationship, but when push comes to shove, I didn’t actually share much of a connection with them after all.
If you’ve gained something, it means that someone, somewhere, has lost something. Even happiness is built on someone else’s misfortune. She often reminded me of this. In fact, she considered it one of the laws of the universe.
Mobile phones have been around for only about twenty years, but in just that short amount of time they’ve managed to take complete control over us.
When human beings invented the mobile phone, they also invented the anxiety that comes with not having one on you.
I had left the work of memory and even my ties to other human beings to my mobile phone. It’s pretty scary to think about what these devices have done to the human brain.
I’d heard somewhere that people forget things in order to build new memories.
The beautiful sound of someone playing the bandoneón echoed outside, and people tangoed on the cobblestone street.
In actuality, I think the romance between us had been over for quite a while. But for some reason we carried on playing anyway, following all the rules. But then all it took was a few days in Buenos Aires to make it obvious that those rules were meaningless.
It would have been nice to have taken the time to listen to what was going on in the other one’s head, to understand each other’s feelings.
I guess it’s the same with life. We all know it has to end someday, but even so, we act as if we’re going to live forever. Like love, life is beautiful because it must come to an end.
With the invention of mobile phones, the idea of not being able to find the person you’re supposed to be meeting disappeared. People forgot what it meant to be kept waiting. That feeling of unbearable impatience at not being able to get ahold of her, mixed with the warm feeling of hope and the shivering cold, was still fresh in my mind.
“Life is a tragedy when seen in close-up, but a comedy in long shot.”
I realized then that when a person talks about something they really love, there’s a kind of thrill to listening to them.
It’s the future you’ll never get to see that you really regret missing most of all when you die.
Sometimes, when you rewatch a film after not having seen it for a long time, it makes a totally different impression on you than it did the first time you saw it. Of course, the movie hasn’t changed; it’s you who has changed, and seeing the same film again makes that impossible to forget.
What did I gain by growing up, and what did I lose? I know the answer to only the second part of that question. Innocence—all those precious hopes and dreams that you can only have when you’re in your adolescence.
“Talking about dreams is like talking about movies, since the cinema uses the language of dreams.”
kind. He’s an apathetic guy, completely lacking in spirit, and is of no interest at all to the audience.
That it would give them a boost and spur them on. After the credits, life does go on. My hope is that my life will go on to live in the memories of others who’ve witnessed my story.
“You only realize what the really important things are once you’ve lost them.”
Every day people sleep, wake up, work, and eat according to the established set of rules we call time.
With freedom comes uncertainty, insecurity, and anxiety. Human beings exchanged their freedom for the sense of security that comes from living by set rules and routines—despite knowing that they pay the cost of these rules and regulations with their freedom.
Humans went ahead and had to impose their own order on a naturally recurring phenomenon. Years, months, hours, minutes, seconds. Every moment has its own name, and there’s no escaping this system.
Did I call my mother as much as I should have? I got so caught up with all the little everyday tasks that I ended up wasting the time that I could have been spending on more important things.
cats ten years, while a mouse will last only for about two years. But whatever the average life span, each animal’s heart beats around two billion times.
“Well, I guess a cat wouldn’t understand. It’s something humans have. It’s when you really like someone and they’re extremely important to you, and it makes you feel like you want to be with them all the time.”
One thing you realize when you’ve lived with a cat for a long time is that you may think that you own them, but that’s not really the way it is. Cats simply allow us the pleasure of their company.”
So that’s why we need cats, to help us understand ourselves better. It’s just like my mother said: Cats don’t need us. It’s us who needs them.
We never bothered to talk to each other, to ask how the other was feeling or what he was thinking about. But it doesn’t work that way. You don’t have a family. You make a family.
When you think about it in those terms, whether your death is a happy death or an unhappy death depends on how you’ve lived your life.
“Yeah, but just being alive doesn’t mean all that much on its own. How you live is more important.”
Like, what if, whenever you reached a fork in the road of life, you’d gone the other way? What would have happened? Who would you have become? That’s what the devil is all about. I’m what you wanted to become but couldn’t.
Humans tend to regret the life they never lived and the choices they never made.”
