Quotes from book

Kafka on the Shore

“Does G get angry because it follows F in the alphabet? Does page 68 in a book start a revolution because it follows 67?”

“But metaphors help eliminate what separates you and me.”

“But if you knew you might not be able to see it again tomorrow, everything would suddenly become special and precious, wouldn’t it?”

“I go back to the reading room, where I sink down in the sofa and into the world of The Arabian Nights. Slowly, like a movie fadeout, the real world evaporates. I'm alone, inside the world of the story. My favourite feeling in the world.”

“Distance might not solve anything, no matter how far you run.”

“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 know that.”

“I think of rivers, of tides. Forests and water gushing out. Rain and lightning. Rocks and shadows. All of these are in me.”

“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”

“Beyond the edge of the world there’s a space where emptiness and substance neatly overlap, where past and future form a continuous, endless loop. And, hovering about, there are signs no one has ever read, chords no one has ever heard.”

“This is the extent of his knowledge of the sea: it was very big, it was salty, and fish lived there.”

“My grandpa always said asking a question is embarrassing for a moment, but not asking is embarrassing for a lifetime.”

“Artists are those who can evade the verbose.”

“Having an object that symbolizes freedom might make a person happier than actually getting the freedom it represents.”

“A deserted library in the morning - there's something about it that really gets to me. All possible words and ideas are there, resting peacefully.”

“He felt as if his heart had dried up. I needed her he thought. I needed someone like her to fill the void inside me. But I wasn’t able to fill the void inside her. Until the bitter end, the emptiness inside her was hers alone.”

“Silence, I discover, is something you can actually hear.”

“In traveling, a companion, in life, compassion.”

“I don’t know what it means to live.”

“Time expands, then contracts, all in tune with the stirrings of the heart.”