After the Quake

by Haruki Murakami

“No matter how far you travel, you can never get away from yourself,”

Premonitions can stand for something else sometimes. And the thing they stand for can be a lot more intense than reality. That’s the scariest thing about having a premonition.

Our hearts are not stones. A stone may disintegrate in time and lose its outward form. But hearts never disintegrate. They have no outward form, and whether good or evil, we can always communicate them to one another.

“To understand something and to put that something into a form you can see with your own eyes are two completely different things. If you could manage to do both equally well, though, living would be a lot simpler.”

The world is full of incomprehensible words,

“We should have been like this to begin with,” she whispered after they had moved from the sofa to her bed. “But you didn’t get it. You just didn’t get it. Not till the salmon disappeared from the river.”