Michael > Recent Status Updates

“All he had ever prayed for was the ability to catch outfield flies, in answer to which God had bestowed upon him a penis that was bigger than anybody else’s. What kind of world came up with such idiotic bargains?”

“[A] fire can be any shape it wants to be. It’s free. So it can look like anything at all depending on what’s inside the person looking at it. If you get this deep, quiet kind of feeling when you look at a fire, that’s because it’s showing you the deep quiet kind of feeling you have inside of yourself.”

“So here we were, fifty men and fifty women, with IQs over 150 and bodies of unusual health and strength, slogging elitely through the mud and slush of central Missouri, reflecting on the usefulness of our skill in building bridges on worlds where the only fluid is an occasional standing pool of liquid helium.”

“What we print in the newspaper completely contradicts reality. A hundred times a day we print the phrase ‘We are free,’ but everywhere in the streets we see the soldiers of a foreign army, everyone knows that there are many political prisoners, trips abroad are forbidden, and even within the country we can’t go wherever we want.”

“It is in the summer that death is closest. Everything dries out, suffocates, comes to a standstill. It’s already been four years since they killed Thomas. In August, very early in the morning, at dawn. They hanged him. The disturbing thing is that they start again every year. At dawn, … I go to the window and I see them. They are starting again, but you can’t kill the same person over and over.”

“I’m only fifty years old. If I stop smoking and drinking, or rather drinking and smoking, I can still write a book. Not books, but a single book, perhaps. I am convinced, Lucas, that every human being is born to write a book, and for no other reason. A work of genius or mediocrity, it doesn’t matter, but he who writes nothing is lost, he has merely passed through life without leaving a trace.”

“It is strictly forbidden to critisize or make jokes about our Liberators or our new government. On the strength of a mere denunciation, anyone at all can be thrown into prison without trial, without sentence. Men and women disappear without anyone knowing why, and their families will never hear from them again.”

“We would write, ‘We eat a lot of walnuts,’ and not ‘We love walnuts,’ because the word ‘love’ is not a reliable word, it lacks precision and objectivity. ‘To love walnuts’ and ‘to love Mother’ don’t mean the same thing. The first expression designates a pleasant taste in the mouth, the second a feeling.”

“We each have a special ‘something’ we can get only at a special time of our life. Like a small flame. A careful, fortunate few cherish that flame, nurture it, hold it as a torch to light their way. But once that flame goes out, it’s gone for ever. What I’d lost was not just Sumire. I’d lost that precious flame.”

“I’ve felt this way for the longest time — that in a Ferris wheel in a small Swiss town… I was split in two for ever. For all I know this may have been some kind of transaction. It’s not like something was stolen away from me, because it all still exists, on the ‘orher side.’ Just a single mirror separates us from the other side. But I can never cross the boundary of that single pane of glass. Never.”

“In the bustle of the airport, passengers dashing here and there, the world I shared with Sumire seemed shabby, helpless, uncertain. Neither of us knew anything that really mattered, nor did we have the ability to rectify that. There was nothing solid we could depend on. We were almost boundless zeros, just pitiful little beings swept from one kind of oblivion to another.”

“For a few seconds I stood there in a strange, dim place. Where the things I could see did not exist. Where the invisible ‘did.’”

“I read slowly, savoring each book one by one. I had all the time in the world then. And there was no danger I’d run out of books, no matter how much I read.
Kafu Nagai, Jun’ichiro Tanizaki, Osamu Dazai, Haruo Sato, Ryunosuke Akutagawa, Koji Uno… I read them voraciously, the authors whose names I knew but hadn’t read, the ones whose names I’d never heard of, any book that seemed interesting.”

“We think it’s natural to get rice pudding after we put rice pudding mix in the microwave and the bell rings, but to me that’s just a presumption. I would be kind of relieved if, every once in a while, after you put rice pudding mix in the microwave and it rang and you opened the top, you got macaroni cheese.”

“My uncle had said that I should think about the simplest things first, but I found it impossible to distinguish between what was simple and what was difficult. And so the next morning, after the rush hour had ended, I took the train to Shinjuku. I decided just to stand there and look at people’s faces. I didn’t know if it would do any good, but it was probably better than doing nothing.”

“… When pain comes to me, I leave my physical self. It’s just like quietly slipping into the next room when someone you don’t want to meet comes along. It is very natural. I recognize the pain has come to my body; I feel the existence of the pain; but I am not there. I am in the next room. And so the yoke of the pain is not able to burden me.”

“Toward noon, turning eastward into the Inuya, we saw the Geoffroy’s dolphin or inia, that gray-yellow river porpoise common throughout the Amazon; how strange it seems to find this animal more than three thousand miles from the sea — though of course there is a theory that all the dolphins and whales of the world were originally land mammals of the amazon basin…”

“It was the strangest thing not to be able to see my own body with my own eyes, though I knew it must be there. Staying very still in the darkness, I became less and less convinced of the fact that I existed. To cope with that, I would clear my throat now and then, or run my hand over my face. That way, my ears could check on the existence of my voice, and my face could check on the existence of my hand.”

“I opened the package that Mr Honda had left me as a keepsake. I worked up a sweat removing layer after layer of carefully sealed wrapping paper, until a sturdy cardboard box emerged. It was a fancy Cutty Sark gift box, but it was too light to contain a bottle of whisky. I opened it, to find nothing inside. It was absolutely empty. All that Mr Honda had left me was an empty box.”

“A well without water. A bird that can’t fly. An alley with no exit. And —“

“Two snow wolves, with their bright red tongues lolling, were walking near the top of the hillock shaped like an elephant’s head. Snow wolves are invisible to human beings, but once the wind has set them raging, they will leap up off the snow at the edge of the uplands and rush hither and thither about the sky, treading the swirling snow clouds.”

“Fear is very much like pain, in the sense that, in the intervals that one is free of it, one forgets how very disagreeable it is.”

“There was a small stand of trees nearby, and from it you could hear the mechanical cry of a bird that sounded as if it were winding a spring. We called it the wind-up bird. Kumiko gave it that name. We didn’t know what it was really called or what it looked like, but that didn’t bother the wind-up bird. Every day it would come to the stand of trees… and wind the spring of our quiet little world.

“Quillabamba is the capital of the province of Concepcion, but its streets are of mud for all of that, and its best hotel and restaurant undistinguished to the point of simple filth; the hotel’s communal toilet had a roof, however, and the restaurant personnel, though barefoot, sadly soiled, and otherwise informal in their appearance, were friendly and fleet of foot.”

“I expect you’ve heard about fox spirits. No doubt there are all kinds of them; but the one I know about is called Tokkobe Torako.”

“One night George Glass showed the Indians colored slides, … , and they gazed admiringly, for the first time in their lives, at pictures of cities, of the sea, and of an ocean liner… But curiously — and this was somehow moving — they were affected most by pictures of wild animals and birds, the egrets, ocelots, and monkeys with which they were familiar.”

“The tree had two friends. One was the earthgod, who lived in the middle of a marshy hollow about five hundred paces away, and the other was a brown fox, who always appeared from somewhere in the southern part of the plain… Of the two of them it was the fox, perhaps, that the birch tree preferred… The only thing was that… the earthgod was honest, whereas the fox was, perhaps, just a bit dishonest.”

“Patagonia — loosely, ‘land of giant feet’ — was named by the small Spaniards in honor of the large footprints of the Indians; the Tehuelches, especially, were very tall, many of the men being six feet four inches and more.”