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Whether you take a doughnut hole as blank space or as an entity unto itself is a purely metaphysical question and does not affect the taste of the doughnut one bit.
At least sunlight is always free.
I was taking my last drag when I saw a man, flashlight in hand, heading my way. Fortyish, gray shirt, gray trousers, and a gray cap. Probably a security guard for the area. “You just threw something, didn’t you?” said the man. “Yeah, I threw something.” “What did you throw?” “Round, metallic, lidded objects.” The security guard put on a sour face. “Why’d you throw them?” “No particular reason. Been throwing things from twelve years back. At times, I’ve thrown half a dozen things at once and nobody said a word.”
Laughing my ass off at this for some reason.
“That was back then,” said the security guard. “This is city property now and it’s against the law to discard rubbish on city property.” I swallowed. For a moment something inside me trembled, then stopped. “The real problem here,” I said, “is that what you say makes sense.”
Baha! Seriously laying in my bed laughing like a damn fool at this whole exchange.
Age certainly hasn’t conferred any smarts on me. Character maybe, but mediocrity is a constant, as one Russian writer put it. Russians have a way with aphorisms. They probably spend all winter thinking them up.
Certainly the funniest Murakami I've read so far!
“Speaking frankly and speaking the truth are two different things entirely. Honesty is to truth as prow is to stern. Honesty appears first and truth appears last. The interval between varies in direct proportion to the size of ship. With anything of size, truth takes a long time in coming. Sometimes it only manifests itself posthumously. Therefore, should I impart you with no truth at this juncture, that is through no fault of mine. Nor yours.”
Now people can generally be classified into two groups: the mediocre realists and the mediocre dreamers. You clearly belong to the latter. Your fate is and will always be the fate of a dreamer.”
speaking with extreme honesty. I mean this as a gesture of gratitude for your previous honesty.
The negation of cognition thus correlates to the negation of language. For when those two pillars of Western humanism, individual cognition and evolutionary continuity, lose their meaning, language loses meaning. Existence ceases for the individuum as we know it, and all becomes chaos. You cease to be a unique entity unto yourself, but exist simply as chaos. And not just the chaos that is you; your chaos is also my chaos. To wit, existence is communication, and communication, existence.”
Had to read THAT twice!
Traffic was jammed solid in the direction of Shinjuku. Evening rush hour, among other things. Past a certain point the cars seemed practically glued in place, motionless. Every so often a wave would pass through the cars, budging them forward a few inches. I thought about the rotational speed of the earth. How many miles an hour was this road surface whirling through space? I did a quick calculation in my head but couldn’t figure out if it was any faster than the Spinning Teacup at a carnival. There’re many things we don’t really know. It’s an illusion that we know anything at all. If a group
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What a paragraph.
"intergalactic joke" - dibs on the band name
To get irritated is to lose our way in life.”
STOIC AF
From the pigeons’ point of view, probably it was I who looked mindless.
I was feeling lonely without her, but the fact that I could feel lonely at all was consolation.
To think that back on dry land people were going about business as usual was pretty peculiar too. Unsettling, that society could go on perfectly well without me.
I dug my hands into my pockets and stood by the window, gazing out. There things unfolded entirely apart from me. Unrelated to my existence—unrelated to anybody’s existence—everything was flowing. The snow fell, the snow melted.
real weakness is as rare as real strength.
“I know how you must feel,” continued the Rat. “But sooner or later, it was bound to disappear. Me and you, these girls with their certain somethings, we’ve all got to go sometime.”
