Haruki Murakami

I said nothing for a time, just ran my fingertips along the edge of the human-shaped emptiness that had been left inside me.

The better you were able to imagine what you wanted to imagine, the farther you could flee from reality.

...All without any more sound than flipping over a playing card. And sitting in this limo, compared to my fifteen-year-old Volkswagen Beetle I'd bought off a friend, was as quiet as sitting at the bottom of a lake wearing earplugs.

When you say you believe, you allow the possibility of disappointment. And from disappointment or betrayal, there may come despair. Such is the way of the mind.

I always felt as if I'd been handed a cardboard box crammed full of monkeys. I'd take the monkeys out of the box one at a time, carefully brush off the dust, give them a pat on the bottom, and send them scurrying off into the fields. I never knew where they went from there.

Because sometimes I have a need for human warmth, I answered honestly. Sometimes, if I can't feel something like the warmth of a woman's skin, I get so lonely I can't stand it.

I'm not afraid to die. What I'm afraid of is having reality get the better of me, of having reality leave me behind.

I don't think it's a question of liking or disliking it,' Tengo said...'It was the one thing he was best at.' 'Hmm. I see,' Kumi said. She pondered this. 'But that might very well be the best way to live your life.

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.

As if a great creature had grown old without being able to express its feelings. Not that it didn't know how to express them, but rather it didn't know what to express.

Sometimes we don't need words. Rather, it's words that need us.

I just gave them a little scare. A touch of psychological terror. As Joseph Conrad once wrote, true terror is the kind that men feel towards their imagination. (from Super-frog Saves Tokyo).