Ben He

“All he wanted from the girl was for her to hold his hand again if possible. He wanted her to squeeze his hand again someplace where the two of them could be alone. And he wanted her to tell him something—anything—about herself, to whisper some secret about what it meant to be Aomame, what it meant to be a ten-year-old girl. He would try hard to understand it, and that would be the beginning of something, though even now, Tengo still had no idea what that "something" might be.”
― Haruki Murakami, 1Q84

“You are at once both the quiet and the confusion of my heart; imagine my heartbeat when you are in this state.”
― Franz Kafka, Letters to Felice

“Such wounds to the heart will probably never heal. But we cannot simply sit and stare at our wounds forever.”
― Haruki Murakami, 1Q84

“Many are the women who can take their clothes off seductively, but women who can charm as they dress?”
― Haruki Murakami, Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World