Quotes from book

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

“But knowing what I don’t want to do doesn’t help me figure out what I do want to do. I could do just about anything if somebody made me. But I don’t have an image of the one thing I really want to do. That’s my problem now. I can’t find the image.”

“Spend your money on the things money can buy. Spend your time on the things money can’t buy.”

“I realize full well how hard it must be to go on living alone in a place from which someone has left you, but there is nothing so cruel in this world as the desolation of having nothing to hope for.”

“You are entering a phase of your life in which many different things will occur… bad things that seem good at first and good things that seem bad at first.”

“You might think you made a new world or a new self, but your old self is always gonna be there, just below the surface, and if something happens, it'll stick its head out and say 'Hi.' You don't seem to realize that. You were made somewhere else.”

“There is nothing so cruel in this world as the desolation of having nothing to hope for.”

“Results aside, the ability to have complete faith in another human being is one of the finest qualities a person can possess.”

“I was enveloped in numbness, and absence of feeling so deep the bottom was lost from view.”

“I'd be smiling and chatting away, and my mind would be floating around somewhere else, like a balloon with a broken string.”

“I don't know -- maybe the world has two different kinds of people, and for one kind the world is this completely logical, rice pudding place, and for the other it's all hit-or-miss macaroni gratin.”

“A person’s destiny is something you look back at afterwards, not something to be known in advance.”

“From the moment of my birth, I lived with pain at the center of my life. My only purpose in life was to find a way to coexist with intense pain.”

“All right, then, I thought: here I am in the bottom of a well.”

“A girl doesn't always want to go out, you know, Mr. Wind-Up Bird. Sometimes she feels like being nasty--like, if the guy's gonna wait, let him really wait.”

“Now all you can do is wait. It must be hard for you, but there is a right time for everything. Like the ebb and flow of tides. No one can do anything to change them. When it is time to wait, you must wait.”

“I could disappear from the face of the earth, and the world would go on moving without the slightest twinge. Things were tremendously complicated, to be sure, but one thing was clear: no one needed me.”

“Of course, they're not clowning aroundto make me laugh. They're doing their best to live verylives, and they just happen to fall down sometimes. I think that's cool.”

“Memories and thoughts age, just as people do. But certain thoughts can never age, and certain memories can never fade.”

“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.”