The Wind-up Bird Chronicle, Haruki Murakmi

#1: Is it possible, in the final analysis, for one human being to achieve perfect understanding of one another? We can invest enormous time and energy in serious efforts to know another person, but in the end, how close can we come to that person's essence? We convince ourselves that we know the other person well, but do we really know anything important about anyone?

 #2: The passage of time will usually extract the venom from most things and render them harmless. Then, sooner or later, I forget about them.

#3: Sometimes, when one is moving silently through such as utterly desolate landscape, an overwhelming hallucination can cause one to feel that oneself, as an individual human being, is slowly unraveling. The surrounding space is so vast that it becomes more and more difficult to keep a balanced grip on one's own being. I wonder if I am making myself clear? The mind expands to fill the entire landscape, becoming so diffuse in the process that one loses the ability in the midst of the Mongolian steppe. How vast it was! It felt more like an ocean than a desert landscape. The sun would rise from the eastern horizon, cut its way across the empty sky, and sink below the western horizon. This was the only perceptible change in our surroundings. And in the movement of the sun, I felt something I hardly know how to name: some huge, cosmic love.  

#4: I wonder if this'll make any sense to you. When we got married, six years ago, the two of us were trying to make a brand-new world-like building a new house on an empty lot. We had this clear image of what we wanted. We didn't need a fancy house or anything, just something to keep the weather out, as long as the two of us could be together. We didn't need any extras. Things would just get in the way. It all seemed so simple to us. have you ever had that feeling, that you'd like to go to a different place and become a whole different self? (...) In that new world of ours, we were trying to get hold of new selves that we're better suited to who we were deep down. We believe we could live in a way that was more perfectly suited to who we were.  

 #5: It was time for me to start getting in touch with the reality of the outside world. Try as you might to avoid it, when it was time, they came for you.