If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking.
Memories warm you up from the inside. But they also tear you apart.
Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional.
Whatever it is you're seeking won't come in the form you're expecting.
What happens when people open their hearts?" "They get better.
If you remember me, then I don't care if everyone else forgets.
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.
I dream. Sometimes I think that's the only right thing to do.
Don't feel sorry for yourself. Only assholes do that.
No matter how much suffering you went through, you never wanted to let go of those memories.
It's like Tolstoy said. Happiness is an allegory, unhappiness a story.
But I didn't understand then. That I could hurt somebody so badly she would never recover. That a person can, just by living, damage another human being beyond repair.
I want you always to remember me. Will you remember that I existed, and that I stood next to you here like this?
I was always hungry for love. Just once, I wanted to know what it was like to get my fill of it -- to be fed so much love I couldn't take any more. Just once.
Listen up - there's no war that will end all wars.
Unfortunately, the clock is ticking, the hours are going by. The past increases, the future recedes. Possibilities decreasing, regrets mounting.
Silence, I discover, is something you can actually hear.
Death is not the opposite of life, but a part of it.
If you can love someone with your whole heart, even one person, then there's salvation in life. Even if you can't get together with that person.
Despite your best efforts, people are going to be hurt when it's time for them to be hurt.
Taking crazy things seriously is a serious waste of time.
Every one of us is losing something precious to us. Lost opportunities, lost possibilities, feelings we can never get back again. That’s part of what it means to be alive.
Don't you think it would be wonderful to get rid of everything and everybody and just go some place where you don't know a soul?
In this world, there are things you can only do alone, and things you can only do with somebody else. It's important to combine the two in just the right amount.
The answer is dreams. Dreaming on and on. Entering the world of dreams and never coming out. Living in dreams for the rest of time.
Letters are just pieces of paper," I said. "Burn them, and what stays in your heart will stay; keep them, and what vanishes will vanish.
For a while" is a phrase whose length can't be measured.At least by the person who's waiting.
I can bear any pain as long as it has meaning.
Two people can sleep in the same bed and still be alone when they close their eyes
No matter what they wish for, no matter how far they go, people can never be anything but themselves. That's all.
I have a million things to talk to you about. All I want in this world is you. I want to see you and talk. I want the two of us to begin everything from the beginning.
The most important thing we learn at school is the fact that the most important things can't be learned at school.
As time goes on, you'll understand. What lasts, lasts; what doesn't, doesn't. Time solves most things. And what time can't solve, you have to solve yourself.
Not just beautiful, though--the stars are like the trees in the forest, alive and breathing. And they're watching me.
Chance encounters are what keep us going.
That's what the world is , after all: an endless battle of contrasting memories.
Only the Dead stay seventeen forever.
A certain type of perfection can only be realized through a limitless accumulation of the imperfect.
Memories and thoughts age, just as people do. But certain thoughts can never age, and certain memories can never fade.
Spend your money on the things money can buy. Spend your time on the things money can’t buy.
What do you think? I'm not a starfish or a pepper tree. I'm a living, breathing human being. Of course I've been in love.
What a terrible thing it is to wound someone you really care for and to do it so unconsciously.
I'm a very ordinary human being; I just happen to like reading books.
No matter how far you travel, you can never get away from yourself.
Most everything you think you know about me is nothing more than memories.
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.
If you're in pitch blackness, all you can do is sit tight until your eyes get used to the dark
Even if we could turn back, we'd probably never end up where we started.
What makes us the most normal," said Reiko, "is knowing that we're not normal.
So the fact that I’m me and no one else is one of my greatest assets. Emotional hurt is the price a person has to pay in order to be independent.
What we seek is some kind of compensation for what we put up with.
It's hard to tell the difference between sea and sky, between voyager and sea. Between reality and the workings of the heart.
It is not that the meaning cannot be explained. But there are certain meanings that are lost forever the moment they are explained in words.
I don't care what you do to me, but I don't want you to hurt me. I've had enough hurt already in my life. More than enough. Now I want to be happy.
In a place far away from anyone or anywhere, I drifted off for a moment.
Sometimes I get real lonely sleeping with you.
I didn't have much to say to anybody but kept to myself and my books. With my eyes closed, I would touch a familiar book and draw it's fragrance deep inside me. This was enough to make me happy.
I said nothing for a time, just ran my fingertips along the edge of the human-shaped emptiness that had been left inside me.
Body cells replace themselves every month. Even at this very moment. Most everything you think you know about me is nothing more than memories.
Not that we were incompatible: we just had nothing to talk about.
You can keep as quiet as you like, but one of these days somebody is going to find you.
Life is not like water. Things in life don't necessarily flow over the shortest possible route.
Everyone may be ordinary, but they're not normal.
I'm not so weird to me.
Dreams come from the past, not from the future. Dreams shouldn't control you--you should control them.
So what’s wrong if there happens to be one guy in the world who enjoys trying to understand you?
There's no such thing as perfect writing, just like there's no such thing as perfect despair.
People leave strange little memories of themselves behind when they die.
If you think God’s there, He is. If you don’t, He isn’t. And if that’s what God’s like, I wouldn’t worry about it.
The sky grew darker, painted blue on blue, one stroke at a time, into deeper and deeper shades of night.
Whiskey, like a beautiful woman, demands appreciation. You gaze first, then it's time to drink.
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.
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?
Find me now. Before someone else does.
Something inside me had dropped away, and nothing came in to fill the cavern.
She's letting out her feelings. The scary thing is not being able to do that. When your feelings build up and harden and die inside, then you're in big trouble.
We're both looking at the same moon, in the same world. We're connected to reality by the same line. All I have to do is quietly draw it towards me.
It's because of you when I'm in bed in the morning that I can wind my spring and tell myself I have to live another good day.
You can hide memories, but you can't erase the history that produced them.
If you can't understand it without an explanation, you can't understand it with an explanation.
If they invent a car that runs on stupid jokes, you could go far.
Each person feels pain in his own way, each has his own scars.
Don't pointless things have a place, too, in this far-from-perfect world?
There are ways of dying that don't end in funerals. Types of death you can't smell.
We knew exactly what we wanted in each other. And even so, it ended. One day it stopped, as if the film simply slipped off the reel.
The light of morning decomposes everything.
In a sense, I'm the one who ruined me: I did it myself.
I am nothing. I’m like someone who’s been thrown into the ocean at night, floating all alone. I reach out, but no one is there. I call out, but no one answers. I have no connection to anything.
I've always done whatever I felt like doing in life. People may try to stop me, and convince me I'm wrong, but I won't change.
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.
Have you ever had that feeling—that you’d like to go to a whole different place and become a whole different self?
Which is why I am writing this book. To think. To understand. It just happens to be the way I'm made. I have to write things down to feel I fully comprehend them.
Somewhere in his body--perhaps in the marrow of his bones--he would continue to feel her absence.
In the world we live in, what we know and what we don't know are like Siamese twins, inseparable, existing in a state of confusion.
Nothing in the real world is as beautiful as the illusions of a person about to lose consciousness.
What I want is for the two of us to meet somewhere by chance one day, like, passing on the street, or getting on the same bus.
But what seems like a reasonable distance to one person might feel too far to somebody else.
All I do is keep on running in my own cozy, homemade void, my own nostalgic silence. And this is a pretty wonderful thing. No matter what anybody else says.
Loneliness becomes an acid that eats away at you.
