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fc2cac3
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Constipation was one of the things she hated most in the world, on par with despicable men who commit domestic violence and narrow-minded religious fundamentalists.
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Haruki Murakami |
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320bb9b
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Music has that power to revive memories, sometimes so intensely that they hurt. But
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Haruki Murakami |
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5334506
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I was confident that I was a special person. But time slowly chips away at life. People don't just die when their time comes. They gradually die away, from the inside. And finally the day comes when you have to settle accounts. Nobody can escape it. People have to pay the price for what they've received. I have only just learned that truth.
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Haruki Murakami |
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2d54aff
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Nah, I shook my head, things that come out of nowhere go back to nowhere, that's all. We fell silent again. The thing we had shared was nothing more than a fragment of time that had died long ago. Even so, a faint glimmer of that warm memory still claimed a part of my heart. And when death claimed me, no doubt I would walk along by that faint light in the brief instant before being flung once again into the abyss of nothingness.
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separation
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Haruki Murakami |
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254e1c9
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We were young, and we had no need for prophecies. Just living was itself an act of prophecy.
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Haruki Murakami |
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d8c7131
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A fire can be any shape it wants to be. It's free. So it can look like anything at all, depending on what's inside the person looking at it. If you get this deep, quiet kind of feeling when you look at a fire, that's because it's showing you the deep, quiet kind of feeling you have inside yourself...
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Haruki Murakami |
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6245406
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Now for a good twelve-hour sleep, I told myself. Twelve solid hours. Let birds sing, let people go to work. Somewhere out there, a volcano might blow, Israeli commandos might decimate a Palestinian village. I couldn't stop it. I was going to sleep.
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sleep
volcano
israeli-palestinian-conflict
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Haruki Murakami |
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97a5349
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tw z mrg nmytrsy? - rstsh nh, khly adm byrzsh dydhm khh mrdn, w gr anh btwnnd bmyrnd, mn hm mytwnm.
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Haruki Murakami |
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e717b14
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Have your dream...What you need now more than anything is discipline. Cast off mere words. Words turn into stone. (from Thailand)
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words
dreams
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Haruki Murakami |
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1b352ad
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If you lose your ego, you lose the thread of that narrative you call your Self. Humans, however, can't live very long without some sense of a continuing story. Such stories go beyond the limited rational system (or the systematic rationality) with which you surround yourself; they are crucial keys to sharing time-experience with others. Now a narrative is a story, not a logic, nor ethics, nor philosophy. It is a dream you keep having, whet..
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lose-one-s-self
self-identity
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Haruki Murakami |
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0737876
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It may well be that we can never fully adapt to our own deformities. Unable to find a place inside ourselves for the very real pain and suffering that these deformities cause, we come here to get away from such things. As long as we are here, we can get by without hurting others or being hurt by them because we know that we are "deformed". That's what distinguishes us from the outside world: most people go about their lives unconscious of t..
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people
truth
outside-world
precondition
hurt
lives
flaws
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Haruki Murakami |
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8bfdb26
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How can I put this? There's a king of gap between what I think is real and what's really real. I get this feeling like some kind of little something-or-other is there, somewhere inside me... like a burglar is in the house, hiding in a wardrobe... and it comes out every once in a while and messes up whatever order or logic I've established for myself. The way a magnet can make a machine go crazy.
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depression
borderline-personality-disorder
bpd
dissociation
dissociative-identity-disorder
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Haruki Murakami |
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07dc859
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How about Proust's In Search of Lost Time?" Tamaru asked. "If you've never read it this would be a good opportunity to read the whole thing." "Have you read it?" "No, I haven't been in jail, or had to hide out for a long time. Someone once said unless you have those kinds of opportunities, you can't read the whole of Proust."
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Haruki Murakami |
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05b5b01
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Time passes slowly. Nobody says a word, everyone lost in quiet reading. One person sits at a desk jotting down notes, but the rest are sitting there silently, not moving, totally absorbed. Just like me.
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haruki-murakami
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Haruki Murakami |
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d4a220a
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Waves of thought are stirring. In a twilight corner of her consciousness, one tiny fragment and another tiny fragment call out wordlessly to eachother, their spreading ripples intermingling.
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Haruki Murakami |
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d220e45
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Shimamoto was in charge of the records. She'd take one from its jacket, place it carefully on the turntable without touching the grooves with her fingers, and, after making sure to brush the cartridge free of any dust with a tiny brush, lower the needle ever so gently onto the record. When the record was finished, she'd spray it and wipe it with a felt cloth. Finally she'd return the record to its jacket and its proper place on the shelf. H..
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music
records
imagery
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Haruki Murakami |
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1077fa7
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Every one of us is losing something precious to us. Lost opportunities, lost possibilities, feelings we can never get back again. That's what part of it means to be alive. But inside our heads -- at least that's where I imagine it -- there's a little room where we store those memories. A room like the stacks in this library. And to understand the workings of our own heart we have to keep on making new reference cards. We have to dust things..
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library
loss
life
little-room
lost-opportunity
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Haruki Murakami |
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df932f8
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My very existence, my life in the world, seemed like a hallucination. A strong wind would make me think my body was about to be blown to the end of the earth, to some land I had never seen or heard of, where my mind and body would separate forever. "Hold tight," I would tell myself, but there was nothing for me to hold on to."
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Haruki Murakami |
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79a6a1a
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I may not be the most likable person in the world, but I try not to upset people.
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Haruki Murakami |
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6f14449
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Painful is the stress when one cannot reproduce or convey vividly to others, however hard he tries, what he's experienced so intensely.
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Haruki Murakami |
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5b5c26e
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I decided to make spaghetti for lunch again. Not that I was the least bit hungry. But I couldn't just go on sitting on the sofa, waiting for the phone to ring. I had to move my body, to begin working toward some goal. I put water in a pot, turned on the gas, and until it boiled I would make tomato sauce while listening to an FM broadcast. The radio was playing an unaccompanied violin sonata by Bach. The performance itself was excellent, but..
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Haruki Murakami |
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a9b28bc
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Every person has their own colour.
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person
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Haruki Murakami |
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889c4bc
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As long as I kept my body moving I could forget about the emptiness inside.
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norwegian-wood
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Haruki Murakami |
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2e2f6fb
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Ever since that happened to me, I haven't been able to give myself to anyone in this world.
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Haruki Murakami |
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59a10de
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Violence does not always take visible form, and not all wounds gush blood
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Haruki Murakami |
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b89fceb
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El conocimiento de la verdad no alivia la tristeza que sentimos al perder a un ser querido. Ni la verdad, ni la sinceridad, ni la fuerza, ni el carino son capaces de curar esa tristeza. Lo unico que puede hacerse es atravesar este dolor esperando aprender algo de el, aunque todo lo que uno haya aprendido no le sirva para nada la proxima vez que la tristeza lo visite de improviso.
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duelo
norwegian-wood
perdida
tristeza
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Haruki Murakami |
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127d1b8
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I never could stand being forced to do something I didn't want to do at a time I didn't want to do it. Whenever I was able to do something I liked to do, though, when I wanted to do it, and the way I wanted to do it, I'd give it everything I had.
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Haruki Murakami |
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6c9871e
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Everybody has some one thing they do not want to lose," began the man. "You included. And we are professionals at finding out that very thing. Humans by necessity must have a midway point between their desires and their pride. Just as all objects must have a center of gravity. This is something we can pinpoint. Only when it is gone do people realize it even existed."
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loss
midway
pride
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Haruki Murakami |
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86c792b
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Some things in life are just to complicated to explain in any language.' Olga was absolutely right, Tsukuru thought as he sipped his wine. Not just to explain to others, but to explain to yourself. Force yourself to try to explain it, and you create lies.
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Haruki Murakami |
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6f3872b
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You're wasting your life being involved with me." "I'm not wasting anything." "But I might never recover. Will you wait for me forever? Can you wait 10 years, 20 years?" "You're letting yourself be scared by too many things," I said. "The dark, bad dreams, the power of the dead. You have to forget them. I'm sure you'll get well if you do." "If I can," said Naoko, shaking her head. "If you can get out of this place, will you live with me?" I..
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Haruki Murakami |
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04e9209
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You're walking through a field all by yourself one day in spring and this sweet little bear cub with velvet fur and shiny little eyes comes walking along. And he says to you, 'Hi, there, little lady. Want to tumble with me?' So you and the bear spend the whole day in each other's arms, tumbling down this clover-covered hill. Nice, huh?
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Haruki Murakami |
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10c7195
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The Earth, time, concepts, love, life, faith justice, evil - they're all fluid and in transition. They don't stay in one form or in one place forever. The whole universe is like some big FedEx box.
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Haruki Murakami |
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69322c5
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Not just beautiful, though -- the stars are like the trees in the forest, alive and breathing. And they're watching me. What I've up till now, what I'm going to do -- they know it all. Nothing gets past their watchful eyes. As I sit there under the shining night sky, again a violent fear takes hold of me. My heart's pounding a mile a minute, and I can barely breathe. All these millions of stars looking down on me, and I've never given them ..
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Haruki Murakami |
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bacf392
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I have always loved Naoko, and I still love her. But there is a decisive finality to what exists between Midori and me. It has an irresistible power that is bound to sweep me into the future. What I feel for Naoko is a tremendously quiet and gentle and transparent love, but what I feel for Midori 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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Haruki Murakami |
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5083df5
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Start making excuses and there's no end to it. I can't live that kind of life.
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Haruki Murakami |
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8293a6a
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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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worldview
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Haruki Murakami |
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109fa2e
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The feel of her hand has never left me. It was different from any other hand I'd ever held, different from any touch I've ever known. It was merely the small, warm hand of a twelve-year-old girl, yet those five fingers and that palm were like a display case crammed full of everything I wanted to know--and everything I had to know. By taking my hand, she showed me what these things were. That within the real world, a place like this existed...
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Haruki Murakami |
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3407b6f
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This is the extent of his knowledge of the sea: it was very big, it was salty, and fish lived there.
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Haruki Murakami |
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0a7fea1
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If writers only wrote about things everybody knew, what the hell would be the point of writing?
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Haruki Murakami |
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7e486b2
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Jean-Jacques Rousseau defined civilization as when people build fences. A very perceptive observation. And it's true--all civilization is the product of a fenced-in lack of freedom. The Australian Aborigines are the exception, though. They managed to maintain a fenceless civilization until the seventeenth century. They're dyed-in-the-wool free. They go where they want, when they want, doing what they want. Their lives are a literal journey...
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Haruki Murakami |
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d1ac570
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Had I done the right thing by not telling her? Maybe not. Who on earth wanted the right thing anyway? Yet what meaning could there be if nothing was right? If nothing was fair? Fairness is a concept that holds only in limited situations. Yet we want the concept to extend to everything, in and out of phase.
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Haruki Murakami |
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69df3df
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Sometimes I run fast when I feel like it, but if I increase the pace I shorten the amount of time I run, the point being to let the exhilaration I feel at the end of each run carry over to the next day. This is the same sort of tack I find necessary when writing a novel. I stop every day right at the point where I feel I can write more. Do that, and the next day's work goes surprisingly smoothly. I think Ernest Hemingway did something like ..
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Haruki Murakami |
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e3a9285
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So just because I don't exist in the sheep man's world, it doesn't mean that I don't exist at all.
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Haruki Murakami |
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fd2c4d8
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I tried hard to forget, but there remained inside me a vague knot of air. And as time went by, the knot began to take on a clear and simple form, a form that I am able to put into words, like this: Death exists, not as the opposite but as a part of life. It's a cliche translated into words, but at the time I felt it not as words but as that knot of air inside me. Death exists - in a paperweight, in four red and white balls on a pool table -..
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Haruki Murakami |