but I wouldn’t count on escaping this place if I were you. No matter how far you run. Distance might not solve anything.”


“There’s only one kind of happiness, but misfortune comes in all shapes and sizes. It’s as Tolstoy said: happiness is an allegory, unhappiness a story.”
― Kafka on the Shore
― Kafka on the Shore

“Ghost food wafting in crystalline recollection—a perfect besotted Manhattan, a half shell oyster shucked and glimmering with seawater, a bowl of minestrone curling with evergreen pesto, the first salty bite into a warm chocolate chip cookie—my mouth wets as my cunt once did. My jaws close on emptiness. Privation serves up these beggar’s purses of imagination, and I could die with want.”
― A Certain Hunger
― A Certain Hunger

“As I sit there under the shining night sky, again a violent fear takes hold of me. My heart’s pounding a mile a minute, and I can barely breathe. All these millions of stars looking down on me, and I’ve never given them more than a passing thought before. Not only the stars – how many other things haven’t I noticed in the world, things I know nothing about? I suddenly feel helpless, completely powerless. And I know I’ll never outrun that awful feeling.”
― Kafka on the Shore
― Kafka on the Shore

“I stare at this ceaseless, rushing crowd and imagine a time a hundred years from now. In a hundred years everybody here – me included – will have disappeared from the face of the earth and turned into ashes or dust. A weird thought, but everything in front of me begins to seem unreal, as if a gust of wind could blow it all away.”
― Kafka on the Shore
― Kafka on the Shore

“Lost opportunities, lost possibilities, feelings we can never get back again. That’s part of what it means to be alive. But inside our heads – at least that’s where I imagine it – there’s a little room where we store those memories. A room like the stacks in this library. And to understand the workings of our own heart we have to keep on making new reference cards. We have to dust things off every once in a while, let in fresh air, change the water in the flower vases. In other words, you’ll live for ever in your own private library.”
― Kafka on the Shore
― Kafka on the Shore

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