Quotes from book

1Q84

“I can bear any pain as long as it has meaning.”

“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.”

“I'm tired of living unable to love anyone. I don't have a single friend - not one. And, worst of all, I can't even love myself. Why is that? Why can't I love myself? It's because I can't love anyone else. A person learns how to love himself through the simple acts of loving and being loved by someone else. Do you understand what I am saying? A person who is incapable of loving another cannot properly love himself.”

“If you can't understand it without an explanation, you can't understand it with an explanation.”

“That's what the world is, after all: an endless battle of contrasting memories.”

“I move, therefore I am.”

“Life is not like water. Things in life don't necessarily flow over the shortest possible route.”

“Constipation was one of the things she hated most in the world, on par with despicable men who commit domestic violence and narrow-minded religious fundamentalists.”

“Whenever she felt like crying, she would instead become angry—at someone else or at herself—which meant that it was rare for her to shed tears.”

“Shakespeare said it best,' Tamaru said quietly as he gazed at that lumpish, misshapen head. 'Something along these lines: if we die today, we do not have to die tomorrow, so let us look to the best in each other”

“You can keep as quiet as you like, but one of these days somebody is going to find you.”

“This may be the most important proposition revealed by history: 'At the time, no one knew what was coming.”

“Loneliness becomes an acid that eats away at you.”

“She curled up and pressed her cheek against his chest. Her ear was right above his heart. She was listening to his thoughts. "I need to know this," Aomame said. "That we're in the same world, seeing the same things.”

“Life is so uncertain: you never know what could happen. One way to deal with that is to keep your pajamas washed.”

“It's the real world, full of gaps and inconsistencies and anticlimaxes.”

“… most people in the world don't really use their brains to think. And people who don't think are the ones who don't listen to others.”

“Beyond the window, some kind of small, black thing shot across the sky. A bird, possibly. Or it might have been someone's soul being blown to the far side of the world.”

“Such wounds to the heart will probably never heal. But we cannot simply sit and stare at our wounds forever.”