Quotes from book

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

“Living like an empty shell is not really living, no matter how many years it may go on. The heart and flesh of an empty shell give birth to nothing more than the life of an empty shell.”

“Once a guy starts using a wig, he has to keep using one. It's, like, his fate. That's why wig makers make such huge profits. I hate to say it, but they're like drug dealers.”

“This person, this self, this me, finally, was made somewhere else. Everything had come from somewhere else, and it would all go somewhere else. I was nothing but a pathway for the person known as me.”

“Tell me, Doctor, are you afraid of death?"
"I guess it depends on how you die.”

“I'm not so weird to me.”

“The little things are important, Mr. Wind-Up Bird”

“In terms of evolutionary history, it was only yesterday that men learned to walk around on two legs and get in trouble thinking complicated thoughts. So don't worry, you'll burn out.”

“Maybe she thought the garbage and rocks in your head were interesting. But finally, garbage is garbage and rocks are rocks.”

“What we see before us is just one tiny part of the world. We get in the habit of thinking, this is the world, but that's not true at all. The real world is a much darker and deeper place than this, and much of it is occupied by jellyfish and things.”

“Nothing so consumes a person as meaningless exertion”

“Thanks to the long days of rain, the blades of grass glowed with a deep-green luster, and they gave off the smell of wildness unique to things that sink their roots into the earth.”

“Have you ever had that feeling—that you’d like to go to a whole different place and become a whole different self?”

“For both of us, it had simply been too enormous an experience. We shared it by. Does this make any sense?”

“Some things, you know, if you say them, it makes them not true?”

“I closed my eyes and tried to sleep. But it was not until much later that I was able to get any real sleep. In a place far away from anyone or anywhere, I drifted off for a moment.”

“We were young, and we had no need for prophecies. Just living was itself an act of prophecy.”

“So this was how secrets got started, I thought to myself. People constructed them little by little.”

“I'm going to take you out of here… I'm going to take you home, to the world where you belong, where cats with bent tails live, and there are little backyards, and alarm clocks ring in the morning.”

“But even so, every now and then I would feel a violent stab of loneliness. The very water I drink, the very air I breathe, would feel like long, sharp needles. The pages of a book in my hands would take on the threatening metallic gleam of razor blades. I could hear the roots of loneliness creeping through me when the world was hushed at 4 o'clock in the morning.”