This is what it means to be loved… when someone wants to touch you, to be tender… my body still knows that feeling, even now. My body knows not to respond to fake love.

When a desk or vase gets scratched, it doesn‘t show you how it‘s hurting. If we keep doing this, just saying nothing, no matter what they do, think maybe we‘ll become things too? That‘s what we are to them.

On and on she spun, every revolution a prayer in reverse.
- Tomoyuki Hoshino, “Pink”

Which is more important, I wonder – not to be lonely, or to live the life you‘ve chosen for yourself?

Nothing like an empty stomach to remind you what you are.

The night was so deathly silent that I felt I could hear the sound of the stars moving across the heavens. The glass of water soaked into my withered heart. It was chilly.

These people are no different from the rest of us. They have a hole in their hearts, and something vital is bleeding out.

How was it that the same hands that hurt me like this could also tickle me or take me to the heights of ecstasy?

I stood alone in the darkness. Light does not illuminate. It only looks for things to illuminate. And I had never been found by the light. I would always be in darkness—

There must be plenty you don‘t see.

Words are such unstable things.

When I scrutinized love, I still found myself in a world that felt empty. My mind wandered through these thoughts.

Somewhere inside, these people are all quietly on fire.

I would feel a tightening in my chest. I pretended not to notice, but back when I was seeing Nishino, the plentiful shadows of other women were always lurking. This was what enabled him to speak so cruelly of marriage to me.

Put your soul in the palm of my hand for me to look at, like a crystal jewel. I‘ll sketch it in words.

Your love is different from mine. What I mean is, when you close your eyes, for that moment, the center of the universe comes to reside within you. And you become a small figure within that vastness, which spreads without limit behind you, and continues to expand at tremendous speed, to engulf all of my past, even before I was born, and every word I‘ve ever written, and each view I‘ve seen, and all the constellations, and all the darkness...

Plenty of people look squarely at things they don‘t want to see and live with them.

People are full of pain. When an imperfect person attempts to accept the imperfections of other people, the result is always painful, because individual storms that find their way into our hearts survive in different places. Sometimes we tend to focus on images that appear to be strangely alive.

It was then that I first felt a deep curiosity about language, and understood it as a tool that encompasses both a single moment and eternity.

Something inside Izzy reached out to something in her and caught fire.

But in a world turned upside down, things I thought were mine and mine alone can be taken away much more easily than I would have imagined.

One moment, the land is pitted with sinkholes, the next moment a plateau suddenly rears up into a perpendicular cliff.

The sensation that the world is slowly dying feels good.

Personal sadness. Was there any other kind? Wasn‘t sadness something that everyone had to endure individually? Just like anger. The idea that you can share anger or sadness with others is nothing more, really, than a compelling illusion. We can only communicate the pain we feel on an individual level.

Shards of memory pierce me. They dig into me.

He kept all the old useless words in the drawers of his brain, never letting them go.

The snow placed its mark on her. The only existence she could have was like the snow‘s, forever in danger of melting away.

As his mind made these connections, he had a visceral realization that the world as it existed in his head and the ground that he walked on every day were actually the same place.

I‘ve already had to deal with the hardest thing in the world. You know what that was? It was to try to meet someone who‘s already disappeared.

Perhaps the main reason for her anger was the fact that we had been affectionate with Chibi and had become close to the cat without her knowledge and without her permission. But on the other hand, would the mere fact of shared affection lead directly to resentment? If the issue involved permission, then would things have been different if permission had been given?

You can stop being husband-shaped now. Take whatever form you want to be!

Night came, settling with the heat, and cast some things in stark relief and others into shadow. The world was saturated with regret and consolation, people and things that went before.

She suffered for her lifelong inability to be a man.

... in the end she would trick eternity itself. This would be the bouquet of roses Kazu would toss to the world ...

Water flows from high places to low places. That is the nature of gravity. Emotions also seem to act according to gravity. When in the presence of someone with whom you have a bond, and to whom you have entrusted your feelings, it is hard to lie and get away with it. The truth just wants to come flowing out. This is especially the case when you are trying to hide your sadness or vulnerability...

In the pale light of midnight‘s foggy street,
I‘m haunted by the goodbye in your eyes.

“Humans can generally be divided into two categories regarding their response to trauma. There are those who can savor it. They use it to change themselves and can enjoy that experience. The others just shut down. They protect themselves by not thinking deeply about it. Being shaken to your core is stressful, either way. Which type do you think you are?”

There was a split second when she saw the music seeping out of the space between earbud and ear like a curl of steam or smoke.

A wall made of air.

My first Mishima - I was doubled over with pity, overcome with a nearly unbearable fervor for his diction, feeling an intense connection with his anguish, and losing my mind at how he had the character ridicule himself. Hilarious and heartbreaking.

Absolutely make this your first Murakami read. A mysterious and mesmerizing introduction to his beloved motifs - cats, pasta, cutty sark, mystery girls, haunting phone calls - and several forays into the both maddening and curious digressions of historically ambiguous relation to the actual plot.

A futile attempt at love - both mocking the traditional and bemoaning the modern in their contrary values - the pathetic devotion of a man to the whore he crafted himself. The epitome of East Meets West chronicled in one couple‘s doomed affair.

There is always only one reality - until you are so lost in this book you forget the world around you. 1Q84 wraps you in two, then three simultaneous perspectives on a world that tilts further and further away from our own, but it is one of Murakami‘s most enthralling novels.