Haruki Murakami

Each and every moment, our bodies are on a one-way journey to collapse and deterioration, unable to turn back the clock.

In Hollywood in the fifties, a happy ending always involved marriage—the creation of an environment in which lovers could have sex legally.

I’ve heard it said that the happiest times in our lives is the period when pop songs really mean something to us, really get to us. It may be true. Or maybe not. Pop songs may, after all, be nothing but pop songs. And perhaps our lives are merely decorative, expendable items, a burst of fleeting color and nothing more.

Maybe what Hatsumi had said to me had had some effect: I could make myself feel far happier just thinking about Naoko than sleeping with some stupid, anonymous girl.

But even so, every now and then I would feel a violent stab of loneliness. The very water I drink, the very air I breathe, would feel like long, sharp needles. The pages of a book in my hands would take on the threatening metallic gleam of razor blades. I could hear the roots of loneliness creeping through me when the world was hushed at 4 o'clock in the morning.

"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."

"I have to pay the price to go on living"

Money had no name of course. And if it did have a name, it would no longer be money. What gave money its true meaning was its dark-night namelessness, its breathtaking interchangeability.

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

"If you're in love with someone, can't you manage one way or another with her?" Hatsumi asked after a few moments' thought. "It's complicated."

You can hide memories, but you can't erase the history that produced them.

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.