No matter how much long-distance running might suit me, of course there are days when I feel kind of lethargic and don’t want to run. Actually, it happens a lot. On days like that, I try to think of a...
No matter how clear things might become in the forest of story, there was never a clear-cut solution, as there was in math. The role of a story was, in the broadest terms, to transpose a problem into...
Never being constrained, thinking about things freely—that’s what you’re hoping for? Exactly. But it seems to me that thinking about things freely can’t be easy. It means leaving behind your physical...
My very existence, my life in the world, seemed like a hallucination. A strong wind would make me think my body was about to be blown to the end of the earth, to some land I had never seen or heard of...
Most human activities are predicated on the assumption that life goes on. If you take that premise away, what is there left?
Mick Jagger once boasted that ‘Satisfaction’ But now he’s over sixty and still singing 'Satisfaction'. Some people might find this funny, but not me. When he was young, Mick Jagger couldn’t imagine hi...
Maybe she thought the garbage and rocks in your head were interesting. But finally, garbage is garbage and rocks are rocks.
Lots of different ways to live and lots of different ways to die. But in the end that doesn't make a bit of difference. All that remains is a desert.
Listen, every object's in flux. The Earth, time, concepts, love, life, faith, justice, evil--they're all fluid and in transition. They don't stay in one form or in one place forever. The whole univers...
Listen, Kafka. What you’re experiencing now is the motif of many Greek tragedies. Man doesn’t choose fate. Fate chooses man. That’s the basic worldview of Greek drama. And the sense of tragedy—accordi...
Listen up—there’s no war that will end all wars,’ Crow tells me. ‘War breeds war. Lapping up the blood shed by violence, feeding on wounded flesh. War is a perfect, self-contained being. You need to k...
Like flowers scattered in a storm, man's life is one long farewell
Jealousy—at least as far as he understood it from his dream—was the most hopeless prison in the world. Jealousy was not a place he was forced into by someone else, but a jail in which the inmate enter...
I’ve built a wall around me, never letting anybody inside and trying not to venture outside myself
I’m not good at talking, Naoko said. Haven’t been for the longest while. I start to say something and the wrong words come out. Wrong or sometimes completely backward. I try to go back and correct it,...
I’m not asking for sympathy, but it would be nice if you could give me a bit more in the way of a response. Other than those cold interjections of yours—ohs and ums. How about a conjunction? A conjunc...
I’m free, I think. I shut my eyes and think hard and deep about how free I am, but I can’t really understand what it means. All I know is I’m totally alone. All alone in an unfamiliar place, like some...
It’s precisely because of the pain, the we can get the feeling, through this process, of really being alive—or at least a partial sense of it.
It’s like when you put instant rice pudding mix in a bowl in the microwave and push the button, and you take the cover off when it rings, and there you’ve got ricing pudding. I mean, what happens in b...
It's like the Tibetan Wheel of the Passions. As the wheel turns, the values and feelings on the outer rim rise and fall, shining or sinking into darkness. But true love stays fastened to the axle and...