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The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

Haruki Murakami

Top 10 Best Quotes

“Is it possible, in the final analysis, for one human being to achieve perfect understanding of another? We can invest enormous time and energy in serious efforts to know another person, but in the end, how close can we come to that person's essence? We convince ourselves that we know the other person well, but do we really know anything important about anyone?”

“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 four o'clock in the morning.”

“Spend your money on the things money can buy. Spend your time on the things money can’t buy.”

“Memories and thoughts age, just as people do. But certain thoughts can never age, and certain memories can never fade.”

“Here's what I think, Mr. Wind-Up Bird," said May Kasahara. "Everybody's born with some different thing at the core of their existence. And that thing, whatever it is, becomes like a heat source that runs each person from the inside. I have one too, of course. Like everybody else. But sometimes it gets out of hand. It swells or shrinks inside me, and it shakes me up. What I'd really like to do is find a way to communicate that feeling to another person. But I can't seem to do it. They just don't get it. Of course, the problem could be that I'm not explaining it very well, but I think it's because they're not listening very well. They pretend to be listening, but they're not, really. So I get worked up sometimes, and I do some crazy things.”

“I realize full well how hard it must be to go on living alone in a place from which someone has left you, but there is nothing so cruel in this world as the desolation of having nothing to hope for.”

“I'm not so weird to me.”

“In a place far away from anyone or anywhere, I drifted off for a moment.”

“Have you ever had that feeling—that you’d like to go to a whole different place and become a whole different self?”

“For both of us, it had simply been too enormous an experience. We shared it by not talking about it. Does this make any sense?”

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Book Keywords:

important, possibility, essence, friendship, love, loneliness, kindlehighlight, life, people, philosophy, thought

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