Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood

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

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

"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."

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

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

"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."

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

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

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

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

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

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

"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."

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

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"Don't feel sorry for yourself. Only assholes do that."