Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood

"If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking."

"It just happens to be the way that I'm made. I have to write things down to feel I fully comprehend them."

"I’ve never once thought about how I was going to die,” she said. “I can’t think about it. I don’t even know how I’m going to live."

"That's the kind of death that frightens me. The shadow of death slowly, slowly eats away at the region of life, and before you know it everything's dark and you can't see, and the people around you think of you as more dead than alive."

"Those were strange days, now that I look back at them. In the midst of life, everything revolved around death."

"Life is here, death is over there. I am here, not over there."

"No truth can cure the sorrow we feel from losing a loved one. No truth, no sincerity, no strength, no kindness can cure that sorrow. All we can do is see it through to the end and learn something from it, but what we learn will be no help in facing the next sorrow that comes to us without warning."

"People leave strange little memories of themselves behind when they die."

"In his or her own way, everyone I saw before me looked happy. Whether they were really happy or just looked it, I couldn't tell. But they did look happy on this pleasant early afternoon in late September, and because of that I felt a kind of loneliness new to me, as if I were the only one here who was not truly part of the scene."

"With my eyes closed, I would touch a familiar book and draw its fragrance deep inside me. This was enough to make me happy."

"Everything was too sharp and clear, so that I could never tell where to start- the way a map that shows too much can sometimes be useless."

"It's easy to talk big, but the important thing is whether or not you clean up the shit."

"Loving another person is a wonderful thing, and if that love is sincere, no one ends up tossed into a labyrinth. You have to have more faith in yourself."

"I don't go out of my way to make friends, that's all."

"This is one more piece of advice I have for you: don't get impatient. Even if things are so tangled up you can't do anything, don't get desperate or blow a fuse and start yanking on one particular thread before it's ready to come undone. You have to realize it's going to be along process and that you'll work on things slowly, one at a time."

"Life doesn't require ideals. It requires standards of action."

"Nobody likes being alone that much. I don't go out of my way to make friends, that's all. It just leads to disappointment."

"Memory is a funny thing. When I was in the scene, I hardly paid it any mind. I never stopped to think of it as something that would make a lasting impression, certainly never imagined that eighteen years later I would recall it in such detail. I didn't give a damn about the scenery that day. I was thinking about myself. I was thinking about the beautiful girl walking next to me. I was thinking about the two of us together, and then about myself again. It was the age, that time of life when every sight, every feeling, every thought came back, like a boomerang, to me. And worse, I was in love. Love with complications. The scenery was the last thing on my mind."

"I have a million things to talk to you about. All I want in this world is you. I want to see you and talk. I want the two of us to begin everything from the beginning."

"Despite your best efforts, people are going to be hurt when it's time for them to be hurt."