The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

Don’t think about it too much, just do it. For a change of pace. It might help you figure out all kinds of things.

said Kumiko, with a hint of regret

Is it possible, finally, for one human being to achieve perfect understanding of another?
We can invest enormous time and energy in serious efforts to know another person, but in the end, how close are we able to 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?

She needed something more noticeable. But I couldn’t think of anything. Which is not to say that I didn’t have any distinguishing characteristics. I owned a signed copy of Miles Davis’s Sketches of Spain. I had a slow resting pulse rate: forty-seven normally, and no higher than seventy with a high fever. I was out of work. I knew the names of all the brothers Karamazov. But none of these distinguishing characteristics was external.

Thirty seconds is all it would take to say, “I’ll be home late tonight,” and there are telephones everywhere, but you just can’t do it.

Curiosity’s like a fun friend you can’t really trust. It turns you on and then it leaves you to make it on your own-with whatever guts you can muster.

beer crate next to the liquor store. H

The more one tries to see into the distance, the more generalized things become.

Is it possible, finally, for one human being to achieve perfect understanding of another?

setting the wok down