Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage

by Haruki Murakami

Jealousy—at least as far as he understood it from his dream—was the most hopeless prison in the world. Jealousy was not a place he was forced into by someone else, but a jail in which the inmate entered voluntarily, locked the door, and threw away the key. And not another soul in the world knew he was locked inside. Of course if he wanted to escape, he could do so. The prison was, after all, his own heart. But he couldn’t make that decision. His heart was as hard as a stone wall. This was the very essence of jealousy.

“Ideas are like beards. Men don’t have them until they grow up.

What I’m looking for here is a free environment, and time. That’s all. In an academic setting if you want to discuss what it means to think, you first need to agree on a theoretical definition. And that’s where things get sticky. Originality is nothing but judicious imitation. So said Voltaire, the realist.”

“Everything has boundaries. The same holds true with thought. You shouldn’t fear boundaries, but you also should not be afraid of destroying them. That’s what is most important if you want to be free: respect for and exasperation with boundaries. What’s really important in life is always the things that are secondary.

having talent’s preferable to having none. But talent only functions when it’s supported by a tough, unyielding physical and mental focus.

Unless you take the leap, you can’t prove it. And once you actually make the leap, there’s no need to prove it anymore. There’s no middle ground. You either take the leap, or you don’t. One or the other.”

The fresh smell of coffee soon wafted through the apartment, the smell that separates night from day.

“Basically a quick, impromptu brainwashing course to educate your typical corporate warriors. They use a training manual instead of sacred scriptures, with promotion and a high salary as their equivalent of enlightenment and paradise. A new religion for a pragmatic age. No transcendent elements like in a religion, though, and everything is theorized and digitalized.

“Cell phones are so convenient that they’re an inconvenience,”

“As long as you work for somebody you have to put up with a lot of crap.”

You can hide memories, but you can’t erase the history that produced them.

The human heart is like a night bird. Silently waiting for something, and when the time comes, it flies straight toward it.