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After the Quake

Haruki Murakami

Top 10 Best Quotes

“No matter how far you travel, you can never get away from yourself.”

“When the fire goes out, you'll start feeling the cold. You'll wake up whether you want to or not.”

“What I was chasing in circles must have been the tail of the darkness inside me.”

“I want to write about people who dream and wait for the night to end, who long for the light so they can hold the ones they love.”

“No matter how far you travel, you can never get away from yourself. It’s like your shadow. It follows you everywhere. -Komura”

“It's just a feeling I have. What you see with your eyes is not necessarily real. My enemy is, among other things, the me inside me.”

“The whole terrible fight occured in the area of imagination. That is the precise location of our battlefield. It is there, that we experience our victories and defeats.”

“He once told me about polar bears - what solitary animals they are. They mate just once a year. One time in a whole year. There is no such thing as a lasting male-female bond in their world. One male polar bear and one female polar bear meet by sheer chance somewhere in the frozen vastness, and they mate. It doesn't take long. And once they are finished, the male runs away from the female as if he is frightened to death: he runs from the place where they have mated. He never looks back - literally. The rest of the year he lives in deep solitude. Mutual communications - the touching of two hearts - do not exist for them. So, that is the story of polar bears - or at least it is what my employer told me about them.' How very strange.' Yes, it is strange. I remember asking my employer, ' Then what do polar bears exist for?' ' Yes, exactly,' he said with a big smile. 'Then what do we exist for?”

“Our hearts are not stones. A stone may disintegrate in time and lose its outward form. But hearts never disintegrate. They have no outward form, and whether good or evil, we can always communicate them to one another.”

“Strange and mysterious things, though, aren't they - earthquakes? We take it for granted that the earth beneath our feet is solid and stationary. We even talk about people being 'down to earth' or having their feet firmly planted on the ground. But suddenly one day we see that it isn't true. The earth, the boulders, that are supposed to be solid, all of a sudden turn as mushy as liquid - From the short story "Thailand”

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Book Keywords:

life-lesson, hearts, love, thought-provoking, travel, life-lessons, writing, dream, yourself, imagination, darkside, communication, psychology, runaway, run-away, shadow

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