Suicides? Heart attacks? The papers didn’t seem interested. The world was full of ways to die, too many to cover. Newsworthy deaths had to be exceptional. Most people go unobserved.
I find myself thinking about my ongoing existence as a human being and the path that lies ahead of me. Though of course these thoughts lead to but one place – death.
A poet might die at twenty-one, a revolutionary or a rock star at twenty four. But after that you assume everything’s going to be all right. you’ve made it past Dead Man’s Curve and you’re out of the tunnel, cruising straight for your destination down a six lane highway whether you want it or not.
It’s unfair.As a rule, life is unfair, I said.Yeah, but I think I did say some awful things.To Dick?Yeah.I pulled the car over to the shoulder of the road and turned off the ignition. That’s just stupid, that kind of thinking, I said, nailing her with my eyes. Instead of regretting what you did, you could have treated him decently from the beginning. You could’ve tried to be fair. But you didn’t. You don’t even have the right to be sorry.
I’m not afraid to die. What I’m afraid of is having reality get the better of me, of having reality leave me behind.
If there’s any guy crazy enough to attack me, I’m going to show him the end of the world — close up. I’m going to let him see the kingdom come with his own eyes. I’m going to send him straight to the southern hemisphere and let the ashes of death rain all over him and the kangaroos and the wallabies.
That’s the kind of death that frightens me. The shadow of death slowly, slowly eats away at the region of life, and before you know it everything’s dark and you can’t see, and the people around you think of you as more dead than alive.
My peak? Would I even have one? I hardly had had anything you could call a life. A few ripples. some rises and falls. But that’s it. Almost nothing. Nothing born of nothing. I’d loved and been loved, but I had nothing to show. It was a singularly plain, featureless landscape. I felt like I was in a video game. A surrogate Pacman, crunching blindly through a labyrinth of dotted lines. The only certainty was my death.
Aren’t you afraid of dying?Not really. I’ve watched lots of good-for-nothing, worthless people die, and if people like that can do it, then I should be able to handle it.
Those were strange days, now that I look back at them. In the midst of life, everything revolved around death.
Tell me, Doctor, are you afraid of death?I guess it depends on how you die.
People die all the time. 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. It’s too easy not to make the effort, then weep and wring your hands after the person dies.
People leave strange little memories of themselves behind when they die.
No truth can cure the sorrow we feel from losing a loved one. No truth, no sincerity, no strength, no kindness can cure that sorrow. All we can do is see it through to the end and learn something from it, but what we learn will be no help in facing the next sorrow that comes to us without warning.
When you come out of the storm, you won’t be the same person who walked in. That’s what this storm’s all about.
Being with her I feel a pain, like a frozen knife stuck in my chest. An awful pain, but the funny thing is I’m thankful for it. It’s like that frozen pain and my very existence are one.
The pain is an anchor, mooring me here.
Sometimes when I look at you, I feel I’m gazing at a distant star.
It’s dazzling, but the light is from tens of thousands of years ago.
Maybe the star doesn’t even exist any more. Yet sometimes that light seems more real to me than anything.
A revelation leaps over the borders of the everyday. A life without revelation is no life at all. What you need to do is move from reason that ‘observes’ to reason that ‘acts’. That’s what critical.
The darkness behind my closed eyelids was like the cloud-covered sky, but the gray was somewhat deeper. Every few minutes, someone would come and paint over the gray with a different-textured gray – one with a touch of gold or green or red. I was impressed with the variety of grays that existed. Human beings were so strange. All you had to do was sit still for ten minutes, and you could see this amazing variety of grays.
Snow floated down every once in a while, but it was frail snow, like a memory fading into the distance.
Me, I’ve seen 45 years, and I’ve only figured out one thing. That’s this: if a person would just make the effort, there’s something to be learned from everything. From even the most ordinary, commonplace things, there’s always something you can learn. I read somewhere that they said there’s even different philosophies in razors. Fact is, if it weren’t for that, nobody’d survive.
You know, they’ve got these chocolate assortments, and you like some but you don’t like others? And you eat all the ones you like, and the only ones left are the ones you don’t like as much? I always think about that when something painful comes up. Now I just have topolish these off, and everything’ll be OK. Life is a box of chocolates. I suppose you could call it a philosophy.
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?
Love can rebuild the world, they say, so everything’s possible when it comes to love.
Haruki Murakami
Time weighs down on you like an old, ambiguous dream. You keep on moving, trying to sleep through it. But even if you go to the ends of the earth, you won’t be able to escape it. Still, you have to go there- to the edge of the world. There’s something you can’t do unless you get there.
As we go through life we gradually discover who we are, but the more we discover, the more we lose ourselves.
I’ve never once thought about how I was going to die,” she said. “I can’t think about it. I don’t even know how I’m going to live.
Nobody’s going to win all the time. On the highway of life you can’t always be in the fast lane.
I’m often asked what I think about as I run. Usually the people who ask this have never run long distances themselves. I always ponder the question. What exactly do I think about when I’m running? I don’t have a clue.
Even chance meetings are the result of karma… Things in life are fated by our previous lives. That even in the smallest events there’s no such thing as coincidence.
Most everything you think you know about me is nothing more than memories.
People die all the time. 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. It’s too easy not to make the effort, then weep and wring your hands after the person dies.
People fall in love without reason, without even wanting to. You can’t predict it. That’s love.
Haruki Murakami
People soon get tired of things that aren’t boring, but not of what is boring.
Maybe it’s just hiding somewhere. Or gone on a trip to come home. But falling in love is always a pretty crazy thing. It might appear out of the blue and just grab you. Who knows — maybe even tomorrow.
Haruki Murakami
When someone is trying very hard to get something, they don’t. And when they’re running away from something as hard as they can, it usually catches up with them.
No matter how much suffering you went through, you never wanted to let go of those memories.
That’s how stories happen — with a turning point, an unexpected twist. There’s only one kind of happiness, but misfortune comes in all shapes and sizes. It’s like Tolstoy said. Happiness is an allegory, unhappiness a story.
Despite your best efforts, people are going to be hurt when it’s time for them to be hurt.
My biggest fault is that the faults I was born with grow bigger each year.
Some things in life are too complicated to explain in any language.
Nobody likes being alone that much. I don’t go out of my way to make friends, that’s all. It just leads to disappointment.
A person learns how to love himself through the simple acts of loving and being loved by someone else.
Haruki Murakami
Anyone who falls in love is searching for the missing pieces of themselves. So anyone who’s in love gets sad when they think of their lover. It’s like stepping back inside a room you have fond memories of, one you haven’t seen in a long time.
The others in the dorm thought I wanted to be a writer, because I was always alone with a book, but I had no such ambition. There was nothing I wanted to be.
Whether you take the doughnut hole as a blank space or as an entity unto itself is a purely metaphysical question and does not affect the taste of the doughnut one bit.