Haruki Murakami, Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World

"Life's no piece of cake, mind you, but the recipe's my own to fool with."

"Well, the death of the body is the flight of the arrow. It's makin' a straight line for the brain. No dodgin' it not for anyone. People have't die, the body has't fall. Time is hurlin' that arrow forward. And yet, like I was sayin' thought goes on subdividin' that time for ever and ever. The paradox becomes real. The arrow never hits. In other words, immortality."

"They dig holes from time to time,' the Colonel explains. 'It is probably for them what chess is for me. It has no special meaning, does not transport them anywhere. All of us dig at our own pure holes. We have nothing to achieve by our activities, nowhere to get to. Is there not something marvelous about this? We hurt no one and no one gets hurt. No victory, no defeat."

"IT's not death. It's eternal life. And you get't'be yourself. Compared to that, this world isn't but a momentary fantasy. Please don't forget that."

"The early autumn sun glinted on the water, an enormous mirror ground to powder and scattered."

"Grandfather always said school's a place where they take sixteen years to wear down your brain. Grandfather hardly went to school either."

"I never had what it takes to make a first-rate anything.''That's wrong,' she declared. 'Everyone must have one thing that they can excel at. It's just a matter of drawing it out, isn't it' But school doesn't know how to draw it out. It crushes the gift. It's no wonder most people never get to be what they want to be. They just get ground down."

"Your "scared" and my "scared" are two different things.''What's that supposed to mean' she asked.'As you get older, you don't recover from things so easy.''As you get older, you also get tired''Yeah,' I said, 'you get tired."

"I study the chessboard and concede defeat."You can gain yourself in five moves" says the Colonel. "Worth fighting to the end. In five moves your opponent can err. No war is won or lost until the final battle is over."

"Nobody chooses to evolve. It's like floods and avalanches and earthquakes. You never know what's happening until they hit, then it's too late."

"Sorel's basic character flaws had all cemented by the age of fifteen, a fact which further elicited my sympathy. To have all the building blocks of your life in place by that age was, by any standard, a tragedy. It was as good as sealing yourself into a dungeon. Walled in, with nowhere to go but your own doom. Walls. A world completely surrounded by walls."

"Were the stars out when I left the house last evening? All I could remember was the couple in the Skyline listening to Duran Duran. Stars? Who remembers stars? Come to think of it, had I even looked up at the sky recently? Had the stars been wiped out of the sky three months ago, I wouldn't have known. The only things I noticed were silver bracelets on women's wrists and popsicle sticks in potted rubber plants. There had to be something wrong with my life. I should have been born a Yugoslavian shepherd who looked up at the Big Dipper every night. No car, no car stereo, no silver bracelets, no shuffling, no dark blue tweed suits. My world foreshortened, flattening into a credit card. Seen head on, things seemed merely skewed, but from the side the view was virtually meaningless—a one-dimensional wafer. Everything about me may have been crammed in there, but it was only plastic. Indecipherable except to some machine. My first circuit must have been wearing thin. My real memories were receding into planar projection, the screen of consciousness losing all identity."

"I shouted into the phone, but there was no reply. Silence floated up from the receiver like smoke from the mouth of a gun."

"They had stolen my memories from me! Nobody had that right. Nobody! My memories belonged to me. Stealing memories was stealing time. I got so mad, I lost all fear. I didn't care what happened. I want to live! I told myself. I will live. I will get out of this insane netherworld and get back my stolen memories back and live. Forget the end of the world, I was ready to reclaim my whole self."

"Wasn't much of a life anyway. Wasn't much of a brain."But didn't you say you were satisfied with your life"Word games," I dismissed. "Every army needs a flag."

"That's evolution. Evolution's always hard. Hard and bleak. No such thing as happy evolution"

"But like a boat with a twisted rudder, I kept coming back to the same place. I wasn't going anywhere. I was myself, waiting on the shore for me to return. Was that so depressing?Who knows? Maybe that was 'despair.' What Turgenev called 'disillusionment.' Or Dostoyevsky, 'hell.' Or Somerset Maugham, 'reality.' Whatever the label, I figured it was me."

"My world foreshortened, flattening into a credit card. Seen head on, things seemed merely skewed, but from the side the view was virtually meaningless--a one-dimensional wafer. Everything about me may have been crammed in there, but it was only plastic. Indecipherable except to some machine."

"Besides being the world the kind of sadness that can not be expressed in tears. You can not explain it to anyone. Unable to take any shape, settles quietly in the bottom of the heart as snow during the windless night."

"I never trust people with no appetite. It's like they're always holding something back on you."