Quote collection
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"As a novelist, you could say that I am dreaming while I am awake, and every day I can continue with yesterday's dream. Because it is a dream, there are so many contradictions and I have to adjust them to make the story work. But, in principle, the original dream does not change."
"My priority is my books, at least at this point. What I have to do is write the narrative of this time."
"If you really want to know what's happening here and now, you've got to use your own eyes and your own judgment."
"It's true though: time moves in its own special way in the middle of the night," the bartender says, loudly striking a book match and lighting a cigarette. "You can't fight it."
"Memory is like fiction; or else it's fiction that's like memory."
"I've never met a girl who thinks like you." "A lot of people tell me that," she said, digging at a cuticle. "But it's the only way I know how to think. Seriously. I'm just telling you what I believe. It's never crossed my mind that my way of thinking is different from other people's. I'm not trying to be different. But when I speak out honestly, everybody thinks I'm kidding or playacting. When that happens, I feel like everything is such a pain!"
"Death was not the opposite of life. It was already here, within my being, it had always been here, and no struggle would permit me to forget that."
"That's all I think about these days. Must be because I have so much time to kill every day. When you don't have anything to do, your thoughts get really, really far out - so far out you can't follow them all the way to the end."
"If you try to use your head to think about things, people don't want to have anything to do with you"
"Some things, you know, if you say them, it makes them not true?"
"So this was how secrets got started, I thought to myself. People constructed them little by little."
"By then running had entered the realm of the metaphysical. First there came the action of running, and accompanying it there was this entity known as me. I run; therefore I am."
"The heavy smell of flower petals stroked the walls of my lungs."
"[...] Shimamoto had her own little world within her. A world that was for her alone, one I could not enter."
"I didn't start running because somebody asked me to become a runner. Just like I didn't become a novelist because someone asked me to. One day, out of the blue, I wanted to write a novel. And one day, out of the blue, I started to run-simply because I wanted to. 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."
"Okay, let’s put it this way. I would like to sleep with you. But it’s alright if I don’t sleep with you. What I’m saying is I’d like to be as fair as possible. I don’t want to force anything on anybody, any more than I’d want anything forced on me. It’s enough that I feel your presence or see your commas swirling around me."
"When I'm running I don't have to talk to anybody and don't have to listen to anybody. This is a part of my day I can't do without."
""I believe you," she whispers after a moment. "Please find my mind.""
"two people can sleep in the same bed and still be alone when they close their eyes"
"Sheep hurt my father, and through my father, sheep have also hurt me."