dangerous at every speed

“In the deepening spring of May, I had no choice but to recognise the trembling of my own heart. It usually happened as the sun was going down. In the pale evening gloom, when the soft fragrance of magnolias hung in the air, my heart would swell without warning, and tremble, and lurch with a stab of pain. I would try clamping my eyes shut and gritting my teeth, and wait for it to pass. And it would pass - but slowly, taking its own time, and leaving a dull ache in its path.”
― Haruki Murakami

“There just happen to be people like that. They’re blessed with this marvellous talent, but they want make the effort to systematise it. They end up squandering it in little bits and pieces. I’ve seen my share of people like that. At first you think they’re amazing. They can sight-read some terrifically difficult piece and do a damn good job playing it all the way through. You see them do it, and you’re overwhelmed. You think, ‘I could never do that in a million years’. But that’s as far as it goes. They can’t take it any further. And why not? Because they won’t put in the effort. They haven’t had the discipline pounded into them. They’ve been spoiled. They have just enough talent so they’ve been able to play things well without any effort and they’ve had people telling them how great they are from an early age, so hard work looks stupid to them. They’ll take some piece another kid has to work on for three weeks and polish it off in half the time, so the teacher assumes they’ve put enough into it and lets them go on to the next thing. And they do that in half the time and go on to the next piece. They never find out what it means to be hammered by the teacher; they lose out on a crucial element required for character building. It’s a tragedy”
― Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood

“By living out lives, we nurture death. True as this might be, it was only one of the truths we had to learn. What I learned from Naoko’s death was this: no truth can cure the sadness we feel from losing a loved one. No truth, no sincerity, no strength, no kindness, can cure that sorrow. All we can do is see that sadness through to the end and learn something from it, but what we learn will be no help in facing the next sadness that comes to us without warning.”
― Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood

“I'm afraid it sounds very rude, but I hope from the bottom of my heart that I shall never set eyes on any of you again.”
― W. Somerset Maugham, Of Human Bondage