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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.
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She was beautiful and seemingly quite intelligent, what with her pentameter search system. There wasn't a reason in the world not to find her appealing.
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I'd made it back to the land of the living. No matter how boring or mediocre a world it might be, this was it.
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I was reborn," she said, her hot breath brushing his ear. "You were reborn," Tengo said. "Because I died once." "You died once," Tengo repeated. "On a night when there was a cold rain falling," she said. "Why did you die?" "So I would be reborn like this." "You would be reborn," Tengo said. "More or less," she whispered quietly. "In all sorts of forms.
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If you think about it, an unfair society is a society that makes it possible for you to exploit your abilities to the limit.
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People lose fifty million skin cells every day. The cells get scraped off and turn into invisible dust, and disappear into the air. Maybe we are nothing but skin cells as far as the world is concerned.
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Which is why I am writing this book. To think. To understand. It just happens to be the way I'm made. I have to write things down to feel I fully comprehend them.
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We were, the two of us, still fragmentary beings, just beginning to sense the presence of an unexpected, to be-aquired reality that would fill us and make us whole.
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I'm not a fast reader. I like to linger over each sentence, enjoying the style. If I don't enjoy the writing, I stop.
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You can have tons of talent, but it won't necessarily keep you fed. If you have sharp instincts, through, you'll never go hungry.
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The things she most wanted to tell him would lose their meaning the moment she put them into words.
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What I feel for her is a wholly different emotion. It stands and walks on its own, living and breathing and throbbing and shaking me to the roots of my being.
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What’s most important is what you can’t see but can feel in your heart. To be able to grasp something of value, sometimes you have to perform seemingly inefficient acts. But even activities that appear fruitless don’t necessarily end up so. That’s the feeling I have, as someone who’s felt this, who’s experienced it.
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The better you were able to imagine what you wanted to imagine, the farther you could flee from reality.
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My imagination is a kind of animal. So what I do is keep it alive.
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You're afraid of imagination and even more afraid of dreams. Afraid of the resposibility that begins in dreams. But you have to sleep and dreams are a part of sleep. When you're awake you can suppress imagination but you can't supress dreams.
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You mean machines are like humans?" I shook my head. "No, not like humans. With machines the feeling is, well, more finite. It doesn't go any further. With humans it's different. The feeling is always changing. Like if you love somebody, the love is always shifting or wavering. It's always questioning or inflating or disappearing or denying or hurting. And the thing is, you can't do anything about it, you can't control it. With my Subaru, it's not so complicated.
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Spend your money on the things money can buy. Spend your time on the things money can’t buy.
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Adults constantly raise the bar on smart children, precisely because they're able to handle it. The children get overwhelmed by the tasks in front of them and gradually lose the sort of openness and sense of accomplishment they innately have. When they're treated like that, children start to crawl inside a shell and keep everything inside. It takes a lot of time and effort to get them to open up again. Kids' hearts are malleable, but once they gel it's hard to get them back the way they were.
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I said nothing for a time, just ran my fingertips along the edge of the human-shaped emptiness that had been left inside me.
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I write my novels personally, desperately and non-negligently. When I write my novels, I think about my novels only, and never do other works.
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Let the world move along as it pleased. If it had any business with him, it would be sure to tell him.
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Closing your eyes isn't going to change anything. Nothing's going to disappear just because you can't see what's going on. In fact, things will even be worse the next time you open your eyes. That's the kind of world we live in. Keep your eyes wide open. Only a coward closes his eyes. Closing your eyes and plugging up your ears won't make time stand still.
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Waiting for your answer is one of the most painful things I have ever been through. At least let me know whether or not I hurt you.