Haruki Murakami

Grammar is like the air: someone higher up might try to set rules for its use, but people won't necessarily follow them.

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."

He inherited from his mother's stories the fundamental style he used, unaltered, in his own stories: namely, the assumption that fact may not be truth, and truth may not be factual.

Speaking of Midori, she sounds like an interesting person. Reading your letter, I got the feeling she might be in love with you. When I told that to Reiko, she said, "Well, of course she is! Even I am in love with Watanabe!'

"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."

Next door was a shop where a middle-aged, sleepy-eyed guy sold "adult toys." I couldn't imagine why anyone would want the kind of sex paraphernalia he had there, but he seemed to do a lot of business. In the alley diagonally across the from the record store I saw a drunken student vomiting. In the games centre across from us at another angle, the cook from a local eatery was killing his break time with a game of bingo that took cash bets. Beneath the eaves of a shop that had closed for the night, a dark-faced homeless guy was crouching, motionless. [....] Every fifteen minutes or so I would hear the siren of an ambulance or cop car. Three drunken company employees in suits and ties came by, laughing at the tops of their voices every time they yelled "Piece of ass!" at a pretty, long-haired girl in a telephone booth.

The more I watched, the more mixed-up my head became. What the hell was this all about? I wondered. What could it possibly mean?

"That's when I noticed she looked taller than usual. What was going on? I wondered: it was so strange! Did she have high heels on? Was she standing on something? I moved closer and was just about to speak to her again when I saw it: there was a rope above her head. It came straight down from a beam in the ceiling - I mean it was amazingly straight, like somebody had drawn a line in space with a ruler."

"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."

The ground was a deep black, the pine branches a brilliant green, the people wrapped in yellow looking like special spirits that were allowed to wander over the earth on rainy mornings only. They floated over the earth in silence, carrying farm tools and baskets and some kind of sack.