# Quote — Haruki Murakami, 1Q84

> You’re still young and healthy. Maybe that’s why you don’t understand what I am saying. Let me give you an example. Once you pass a certain age, life becomes nothing more than a process of continual loss. Things that are important to your life begin to slip out of your grasp, one after another, like a comb losing teeth. And the only things that come to take their place are worthless imitations. Your physical strength, your hopes, your dreams, your ideals, your convictions, all meaning, or, then again, the people you love: one by one, they fade away. Some announce their departure before they leave, while others just disappear all of a sudden without warning one day. And once you lose them you can never get them back. Your search for replacements never goes well. It’s all very painful—as painful as actually being cut with a knife. You will be turning thirty soon, Mr. Kawana, which means that, from now on, you will gradually enter that twilight portion of life—you will be getting older. You are probably beginning to grasp that painful sense that you are losing something, are you not?

- Author: [Haruki Murakami](https://www.leafyquotes.com/haruki-murakami.md)
- Book: [1Q84](https://www.leafyquotes.com/haruki-murakami/1q84.md)
- Page: 482
- Source: [Wikiquote](https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/1Q84#Book_2_(July-September)) ([CC BY-SA 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/))
- Quote page: https://www.leafyquotes.com/haruki-murakami/1q84/youre-still-young

## More from this book

> The pursuer’s blind spot is that he never thinks he’s being pursued.

p. 1025 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/haruki-murakami/1q84/the-pursuers-blind.md)

> So he always kept his mouth shut. He kept his ears open and listened closely to whatever anyone else had to say, aiming to learn something from everything he heard. This habit eventually became a useful tool. Through this, he discovered a number of important realities, including this one: most people in the world don’t really use their brains to think. And people who don’t think are the ones who don’t listen to others.

p. 868 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/haruki-murakami/1q84/so-he-always.md)

> Before he had realized it, these exercises had given him the talent to be skeptical about his own self, and he had come to the recognition that most of what is generally considered the truth is entirely relative. Subject and object are not as distinct as most people think. If the boundary separating the two isn’t clear-cut to begin with, it is not such a difficult task to intentionally shift back and forth from one to the other.

p. 913 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/haruki-murakami/1q84/before-he-had.md)