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1Q84 #1-2

Haruki Murakami

Top 10 Best Quotes

“You can't go anywhere if you just resign yourself to being attacked. A state of chronic powerlessness eats away at a person.”

“Certain kinds of knowledge rob people of their sleep.”

“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.”

“Don’t let appearances fool you. There’s always only one reality.”

“If you belong to the majority, you can avoid thinking about lots of troubling things.”

“If you can’t understand it without an explanation, you can’t understand it with an explanation,”

“It's not me but the world that's deranged. Yes, that settles it. At some point in time, the world I knew either vanished or withdrew, and another world came to take its place. Like the switching of a track. In other words, my mind, here and now belongs to the world that was, but the world itself has already changed into something else. So far, the actual changes carried out in that process are limited in number. Most of the new world has been retained from the world I knew, which is why the changes have presented (virtually) no impediments to my daily life - so far. But the changes that have already taken place will almost certainly create other, greater, differences around me as time goes by. Those differences will expand little by little and will, in some cases, destroy the logicality of the actions I take. They could well cause me to commit errors that are - for me - literally fatal. Parallel worlds.”

“Wouldn’t this be tantamount to giving a butterfly a skeleton?”

“Walking to the subway, Aomame kept thinking about the strangeness of the world. If, as the dowager had said, we are nothing but gene carriers, why do so many of us have to lead such strangely shaped lives? Wouldn’t our genetic purpose – to transmit DNA – be served just as well if we lived simple lives, not bothering our heads with a lot of extraneous thoughts, devoted entirely to preserving life and procreating? Did it benefit the genes in any way for us to lead such intricately warped, even bizarre, lives?”

“Their world is like the one that George Orwell depicted in his novel. I’m sure you realize that there are plenty of people who are looking for exactly that kind of brain death. It makes life a lot easier. You don’t have to think about difficult things, just shut up and do what your superiors tell you to do. You never have to starve.”

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Book Keywords:

powerlessness, 1q84, haruki-murakami, self-defense, aomame

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