“It made her think of Laika, the dog. The man-made satellite streaking soundlessly across the blackness of outer space. The dark, lustrous eyes of the dog gazing out the tiny window. In the infinite loneliness of space, what could the dog possibly be looking at?”
Lonely feeling
Lonely Quotes — page 278 of 309
“There's no sense forcing yourself if you don't feel like it. Tell you the truth, I've had sex with lots of guys, but I think I did it mostly out of fear. I was scared not to have somebody putting his arms around me, so I could never say no. That's all. Nothing good ever came of sex like that. All it does is grind down the meaning of life a piece at a time.”
“If I stayed here, something inside me would be lost forever—something I couldn't afford to lose. It was like a vague dream, a burning, unfulfilled desire. The kind of dream people have only when they're seventeen.”
“Then I noticed that my shadow was crying too, shedding clear, sharp shadow tears. Have you ever seen the shadows of tears, Mr. Wind-Up Bird? They’re nothing like ordinary shadows. Nothing at all. They come here from some other, distant world, especially for our hearts. Or maybe not. It struck me then that the tears my shadow was shedding might be the real thing, and the tears that I was shedding were just shadows. You don’t get it, I’m sure, Mr. Wind-Up Bird. When a naked seventeen-year-old girl is shedding tears in the moonlight, anything can happen. It’s true.”
“I didn't feel like I was in my own body; my body was just a lonely, temporary container I happened to be borrowing.”
“Nakata's empty inside... Do you know what it means to be completely empty? Being empty is like a vacant house. An unlocked, vacant house. Anybody can come in, anytime they want. That's what scares me the most”
“But I found that the longer you teach, the more you feel like a total stranger to yourself”
“Who can really distinguish between the sea and what's reflected in it? Or tell the difference between the falling rain and loneliness?”
“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.”
“[...] Shimamoto had her own little world within her. A world that was for her alone, one I could not enter.”
“two people can sleep in the same bed and still be alone when they close their eyes”
“Somewhere in his body--perhaps in the marrow of his bones--he would continue to feel her absence.”
“Not that we were incompatible: we just had nothing to talk about.”
“Her pupils have taken on a lonely hue, like grey clouds reflected in a calm lake.”
“This was never any place I was meant to be. This isn’t a place for me.”
“It's like a kid standing at the window watching the rain.”
“Once she was out of the car and gone, my world was suddenly hollow and meaningless.”
“Where are you now?’ Where was I now? Gripping the receiver, I raised my hand and turned to see what lay beyond the telephone booth. Where was I now? I had no idea. No idea at all. Where was this place? All that flashed into my eyes were the countless shapes of people walking by to nowhere. Again and again, I called out for Midori from the dead center of this place that was no place.”
“It is a lonely life sometimes, like throwing a stone into the deep darkness. It might hit something, but you can’t see it. The only thing you can do is to guess, and to believe.”
“I didn't read so much Japanese literature. Because my father was a teacher of Japanese literature, I just wanted to do something else.”