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But sometimes, without even realizing it, we trample on people’s feelings, hurt their pride, make them feel bad.
“There’s nothing worth getting in this world that you can get easily.”
“But, when you put in that much time and effort, if you do achieve that difficult thing it becomes the cream of your life.”
“Things like this happen sometimes in our lives,” I told him. “Inexplicable, illogical events that nevertheless are deeply disturbing. I guess we need to not think about them, just close our eyes and get through them. As if we were passing under a huge wave.”
Your brain is made to think about difficult things. To help you get to a point where you understand something that you didn’t understand at first. And that becomes the cream of your life. The rest is boring and worthless.
“Loving someone is like having a mental illness that’s not covered by health insurance,”
As I consider that we’ll never meet again I also consider how there’s no reason that we cannot Will we meet or will it simply end like this drawn by the light trampled by shadows
Like two straight lines overlapping, we momentarily crossed at a certain point, then went our separate ways.
Each and every moment, our bodies are on a one-way journey to collapse and deterioration, unable to turn back the clock. I close my eyes, I open them again, only to realize that in the interim so many things have vanished. Buffeted by the intense midnight winds, these things—some with names, some without—disappear without a trace. All that is left is a faint memory. Even memory, though, can hardly be relied on. Can anyone say for certain what really happened to us back then?
“Death always comes on suddenly,” Bird said. “But it also takes its time. Like the beautiful phrases that come into your head. It lasts an instant, yet those instants can draw out forever. As long as from the East Coast to the West Coast—or to infinity, even. The concept of time is lost there. In that sense, I might have been dead even as I lived out my life. But actual death is a crushing. What’s existed until then suddenly and completely vanishes. Returns to nothingness. In my case, that existence was me.”
The death of a dream can be, in a way, sadder than that of a living being. Sometimes it all seems so unfair.
I’ve heard it said that the happiest time in our lives is the period when pop songs really mean something to us, really get to us. It may be true. Or maybe not. Pop songs may, after all, be nothing but pop songs. And perhaps our lives are merely decorative, expendable items, a burst of fleeting color and nothing more.
He was a serious person whose favorite saying was that the repetition of accurate facts was the true road to wisdom.
“I believe that love is the indispensable fuel that allows us to go on living. Someday that love may end. Or it may never amount to anything. But even if love fades away, even if it’s unrequited, you can still hold on to the memory of having loved someone, of having fallen in love with someone. And that’s a valuable source of warmth. Without that heat source a person’s heart—and a monkey’s heart, too—would turn into a bitterly cold, barren wasteland. A place where not a ray of sunlight falls, where the wildflowers of peace, the trees of hope, have no chance to grow. I treasure the names of
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Even if that happened, I seriously doubt that my saying “Of all the women I’ve known until now, she was the ugliest” would bother her much. For all I know, she might even find it amusing. She was more aware than anyone that her looks were far from appealing, or ugly, as I put it, and even enjoyed using this to her advantage.
isn’t a woman who is not beautiful—who is even considered to be ugly—and yet enjoys that fact, a far happier person?
Age, height, the shape and size of one’s breasts, let alone the shape of big toenails or the length of one’s earlobes,
Typical murakami
I’m not sure how to put it exactly, but as we chatted, I grew accustomed to her looks. They no longer seemed to matter.
When the buzzer sounded ending the intermission, and then when we said goodbye, I thought if only she were good-looking, or at least if her looks were a little better, she’d be a very appealing woman. But later on, I learned the hard way how shallow and superficial my thinking had been.
EMANG
Schumann’s Carnaval, I finally declared.
Oh jd ini asal usul judulnya
You’d think that a man seeing a woman ten years younger this frequently would cause some discord at home, but my wife didn’t worry about her at all.
LAH LOH APAKAH INI MEMOIR
“All of us, more or less, wear masks. Because without masks we can’t survive in this violent world.
That’s who we are. And that’s Carnaval.
What kept me from making love with her—from actually ever feeling that I wanted to—wasn’t so much the beauty or ugliness of her mask, but more my fear of what I’d see lying beneath. Whether it was the face of evil, or the face of an angel.
but the sense of discomfort I felt then was far more individual, like an actual tingling pain on my skin. There was something unhealthy about it, like the feeling of helpless impotence you get when you’ve been taken in by a bizarre scheme.
Happiness is always a relative thing. Don’t you think?
I always get the feeling I’m missing something vital. Like with sex, when you…hold on, let’s not go there.
LMAOOOOO
It’s true that life brings us far more defeats than victories. And real-life wisdom arises not so much from knowing how we might beat someone as from learning how to accept defeat with grace.
Of course, winning is much better than losing. No argument there. But winning or losing doesn’t affect the weight and value of the time. It’s the same time, either way. A minute is a minute, an hour is an hour. We need to cherish it. We need to deftly reconcile ourselves with time, and leave behind as many precious memories as we can—that’s what’s the most valuable.
When I write novels, I often experience the same feeling as that young man. I want to face people in the world and apologize to each and every one. “I’m sorry, but all I have is dark beer.”
Some days are like that. You have time on your hands, and you try to decide what you want to do, but can’t come up with a thing.
