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“Don’t you ever play anything but LPs?” “I don’t like CDs,” he replies. “Why not?” “They’re too shiny.”
time moves in its own special way in the middle of the night,”
The ground we stand on looks solid enough, but if something happens it can drop right out from under you. And once that happens, you’ve had it: things’ll never be the same. All you can do is go on living alone down there in the darkness.”
“When I finish work and get into bed, I always think: let me not wake up. Let me just go on sleeping. ’Cause then I wouldn’t have to think about anything.
In this world, there are things you can only do alone, and things you can only do with somebody else. It’s important to combine the two in just the right amount.”
Memory is so crazy! It’s like we’ve got these drawers crammed with tons of useless stuff. Meanwhile, all the really important things we just keep forgetting, one after the other.”
“You know what I think?” she says. “That people’s memories are maybe the fuel they burn to stay alive. Whether those memories have any actual importance or not, it doesn’t matter as far as the maintenance of life is concerned. They’re all just fuel. Advertising fillers in the newspaper, philosophy books, dirty pictures in a magazine, a bundle of ten-thousand-yen bills: when you feed ’em to the fire, they’re all just paper. The fire isn’t thinking, ‘Oh, this is Kant,’ or ‘Oh, this is the Yomiuri evening edition,’ or ‘Nice tits,’ while it burns. To the fire, they’re nothing but scraps of paper.
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The same crescent moon is floating there. Strange that, viewed from one spot in the pre-dawn city, such a big solid object could be hanging there free of charge.
“It’s not as if our lives are divided simply into light and dark. There’s a shadowy middle ground. Recognising and understanding the shadows is what a healthy intelligence does. And to acquire a healthy intelligence takes a certain amount of time and effort.
