Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood

"With my eyes closed, I would touch a familiar book and draw its fragrance deep inside me. This was enough to make me happy."

"Everything was too sharp and clear, so that I could never tell where to start- the way a map that shows too much can sometimes be useless."

"In his or her own way, everyone I saw before me looked happy. Whether they were really happy or just looked it, I couldn't tell. But they did look happy on this pleasant early afternoon in late September, and because of that I felt a kind of loneliness new to me, as if I were the only one here who was not truly part of the scene."

"This is one more piece of advice I have for you: don't get impatient. Even if things are so tangled up you can't do anything, don't get desperate or blow a fuse and start yanking on one particular thread before it's ready to come undone. You have to realize it's going to be along process and that you'll work on things slowly, one at a time."

"What happens when people open their hearts?""They get better."

"This is one more piece of advice I have for you: don't get impatient. Even if things are so tangled up you can't do anything, don't get desperate or blow a fuse and start yanking on one particular thread before it's ready to come undone. You have to realize it's going to be along process and that you'll work on things slowly, one at a time."

"Despite your best efforts, people are going to be hurt when it's time for them to be hurt."

"Despite your best efforts, people are going to be hurt when it's time for them to be hurt."

"Nobody likes being alone that much. I don't go out of my way to make friends, that's all. It just leads to disappointment."

"I was always hungry for love. Just once, I wanted to know what it was like to get my fill of it -- to be fed so much love I couldn't take any more. Just once."

"I have a million things to talk to you about. All I want in this world is you. I want to see you and talk. I want the two of us to begin everything from the beginning."

"It just happens to be the way that I'm made. I have to write things down to feel I fully comprehend them."

"With my eyes closed, I would touch a familiar book and draw its fragrance deep inside me. This was enough to make me happy."

"No truth can cure the sorrow 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 it through to the end and learn something from it, but what we learn will be no help in facing the next sorrow that comes to us without warning."

"But who can say what's best? That's why you need to grab whatever chance you have of happiness where you find it, and not worry about other people too much. My experience tells me that we get no more than two or three such chances in a life time, and if we let them go, we regret it for the rest of our lives."

"People leave strange little memories of themselves behind when they die."

"If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking."

"I don't go out of my way to make friends, that's all."

"Those were strange days, now that I look back at them. In the midst of life, everything revolved around death."

"Life doesn't require ideals. It requires standards of action."