The answer is dreams. Dreaming on and on. Entering the world of dreams and never coming out. Living in dreams for the rest of time.

I used to think the years would go by in order, that you get older one year at a time. But it's not like that. It happens overnight.

My heroes don't have anything special. They have something to tell other people but they don't know how, so they talk to themselves.

Her voice was like a line from an old black-and-white Jean-Luc Godard movie, filtering in just beyond the frame of my consciousness.

We knew exactly what we wanted in each other. And even so, it ended. One day it stopped, as if the film simply slipped off the reel.

When I am writing, I do not distinguish between the natural and supernatural. Everything seems real. That is my world, you could say.

You’re really cute, Midori,” I corrected myself. “What do you mean really cute?” “So cute the mountains crumble and the oceans dry up.

There's an essential order you have to follow in everything. It's a way of showing respect, following everything in the correct order.

I'm kind of a low-key guy. The spotlight doesn't suit me. I'm more of a side dish--cole slaw or French fries or a Wham! backup singer.

You know what I should do?" Hoshino asked excited. "Of course," the cat said. "What'd I tell you? Cats know everything. Not like dogs.

I didn't read so much Japanese literature. Because my father was a teacher of Japanese literature, I just wanted to do something else.

Who can really distinguish between the sea and what's reflected in it? Or tell the difference between the falling rain and loneliness?

Painful is the stress when one cannot reproduce or convey vividly to others, however hard he tries, what he's experienced so intensely.

...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.

Give yourself five minutes to consider how you can turn a miserable situation to your benefit and that light bulb is going to click on.

The silence grew deeper, so deep that if you listened carefully you might very well catch the sound of the earth revolving on its axis.

What matters is deciding in your heart to accept another person completely. When you do that, it is always the first time and the last.

When people tell a lie about something, they have to make up a bunch of lies to go with the first one. ‘Mythomania’ is the word for it.

Letters are just pieces of paper," I said. "Burn them, and what stays in your heart will stay; keep them, and what vanishes will vanish.

...I've just been feeling insecure since I was 20, and that's all I've been trying to express. Now the entire world is feeling insecure.

Possibilities are like cancer. The more I think about them, the more they multiply, and there's no way to stop them. I'm out of control.

Grandfather always said school’s a place where they take sixteen years to wear down your brain. Grandfather hardly went to school either.

There had to be something wrong with my life. I should have been born a Yugoslavian shepherd who looked up at the Big Dipper every night.

As long as there's such a thing as time, everybody's damaged in the end, changed into something else. It always happens, sooner or later.

Life is a lot more fragile than we think. So you should treat others in a way that leaves no regrets. Fairly, and if possible, sincerely.

At the entrance to the original tower, there is a stone into which Jung carved some words with his own hand: 'Cold or not, God is present.

It was spring break, so the theater was always packed with high schools students. It was an animal house. I wanted to burn the place down.

What I'd like to be is a unique writer who's different from everybody else. I want to be a writer who tells stories unlike other writers'.

Everyone who has something is afraid of losing it, and people with nothing are worried they'll forever have nothing. Everyone is the same.

The power to concentrate was the most important thing. Living without this power would be like opening one’s eyes without seeing anything.

Everything was too sharp and clear, so that I could never tell where to start- the way a map that shows too much can sometimes be useless.

Sometimes when I'm with you, I remember things I lost when I was your age. Like I remember the sound of the rain and the smell of the wind.

One of these days they'll be making a film where the whole human race gets wiped out in a nuclear war, but everything works out in the end.

I have read all my novels that were translated into English. Reading my novels is enjoyable because I forget almost all the content in them.

It is not that the meaning cannot be explained. But there are certain meanings that are lost forever the moment they are explained in words.

Hundreds of butterflies flitted in and out of sight like short-lived punctuation marks in a stream of consciousness without beginning or end.

This is what it means to live on. When granted hope, a person uses it as fuel, as a guidepost to life. It is impossible to live without hope.

As long as I was alive, I was something. That was just how it was. But somewhere along the way it all changed. Living turned me into nothing.

Generally, people who are good at writing letters have no need to write letters. They've got plenty of life to lead inside their own context.

It’s precisely because of the pain, the we can get the feeling, through this process, of really being alive—or at least a partial sense of it.

I write my novels personally, desperately and non-negligently. When I write my novels, I think about my novels only, and never do other works.

Sometimes I feel like a caretaker of a museum -- a huge, empty museum where no one ever comes, and I'm watching over it for no one but myself.

Whenever she felt like crying, she would instead become angry—at someone else or at herself—which meant that it was rare for her to shed tears.

But if you peeled away the ornamental egos that she had built, there was only an abyss of nothingness and the intense thirst that came with it.

If you can love someone with your whole heart, even one person, then there's salvation in life. Even if you can't get together with that person.

Unfortunately, the clock is ticking, the hours are going by. The past increases, the future recedes. Possibilities decreasing, regrets mounting.

She was hearing everything that went on in his heart, like a person who can trace a map with his fingertip and conjure up vivid, living scenery.

Sometimes, however, this sense of isolation, like acid spilling out of a bottle, can unconsciously eat away at a person’s heart and dissolve it.

I've been running a full marathon every year for more than 20 years, and my record is getting worse. Getting older, getting worse. It's natural.

So the fact that I’m me and no one else is one of my greatest assets. Emotional hurt is the price a person has to pay in order to be independent.

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