Norwegian Wood

"I look around me sometimes and I get sick to my stomach. Why the hell don't these bastards do something? I wonder. They don't do a damn thing, and then they bitch."

"When you start at zero, you've got a lot to learn."

Death had already taken John Coltrane, who was joined by now by so many others. People screamed there'd be revolutionary changes - which always seemed to be just ahead, at the curve in the road. But the "changes" that came were just two-dimensional stage sets, background without substance or meaning.

Death exists, not as the opposite but as a part of life."

"Just remember, life is a box of chocolates"

I shook my head a few times and looked at her. "Maybe I'm not so smart, but sometimes I don't know what on earth you're talking about."

"You know, they've got these cookie assortments, and you like some but you don't like others? And you eat all the ones you like,and the only ones left are the ones you don't like as much? I always think about that when something painful comes up. 'Now I just have to polish these off, and everything'll be OK.' Life is a box of cookies."

"I suppose you could call it a philosophy."

"It's true, though. I've learned it from experience."

"If you think about it, an unfair society is a society that makes it possible for you to exploit your abilities to the limit."

But who can say what's best? That's why you need to grab whatever chance you have of happiness where you find it, and not worry about other people too much. My experience tells me that we get no more than two or three such chances in a life time, and if we let them go, we regret it for the rest of our lives.

"It's not that I don't believe in contemporary literature, but I don't want to waste valuable time reading any book that has not had the baptism of time. Life is too short."

"Being able to say you don't have any money [is the best thing about being rich]. Like, if I suggested to a classmate we should do something, she could say, 'Sorry, I don't have any money.' Which is something I could never say if the situation was reversed. If I said 'I don't have any money,' it would really mean 'I don't have any money.' It's sad. Like if a pretty girl says 'I look terrible today, I don't want to go out,' that's O.K., but if an ugly girl says the same thing people laugh at her."

" People are strange when you're a stranger."

I would stare at the grains of light suspended in that silent space, struggling to see into my own heart. What did I want? And what did others want from me? But I could never find the answers. Sometimes I would reach out and try to grasp the grains of light, but my fingers touched nothing.

Death exists - in a paperweight, in four red and white balls on a billiard table - and we go on living and breathing it into our lungs like fine dust.

"And what is a revolution? It sure as hell isn't just changing the name on city hall."

"I have a lot more patience for others than I have for myself, and I'm much better at bringing out the best in others than in myself. That's just the kind of person I am. I'm the scratchy stuff on the side of the matchbox. But that's fine with me. I don't mind at all. Better to be a first-class matchbox than a second-class match."

"But it's the working class that keep things running, and it's the working class that gets exploited. What the hell kind of revolution have you got just tossing out big words that working-class people can't understand? What the hell kind of social revolution is that?"

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

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

[...] even if we hadn't met that day, my life might not have been any different. We had met that day because we were supposed to meet. If we hadn't met then and there, we would have just met somewhere else sometime.

"A gentleman is someone who does not what he wants to do but what he should do."

If you're in pitch blackness, all you can do is sit tight until your eyes get used to the dark.

How many Sundays - how many hundreds of Sundays like this - lay ahead of me? "Quiet, peaceful, and lonely," I said aloud to myself.

"They're scared to death somebody's gonna find out they don't know something. They all read the same books and they all throw around the same words, and they get off listening to John Coltrane and seeing Pasolini movies. You call that 'revolution'?"

Only the dead stay seventeen forever.

"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. I hate that, I couldn't stand it."