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Maybe It's Just Hiding Somewhere. Or Gone On A Trip To Come Home. But Falling In Love Is Always A Pretty Crazy Thing. It Might Appear Out Of The Blue And Just Grab You. Who Knows — Maybe Even Tomorrow.

-Haruki Murakami

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Maybe It's Just Hiding

Haruki Murakami

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Maybe It's Just Hiding Somewhere. Or Gone On A Trip To Come Home. But Falling In Love Is Always A Pretty Crazy Thing. It Might Appear Out Of The Blue And Just Grab You. Who Knows — Maybe Even Tomorrow.

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With The Advent Of Winter, Her Eyes Seemed To Take On A Greater Transparency, A Transparency That Lead Nowhere. Occassionally, For No Particular Reason, Naoko Would Gaze Into My Eyes As If Searching For Something. Each Time I Was Filled With Odd Sensations Of Lonliness And Inadequecy.

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Most Things Are Forgotten Over Time. Even The War Itself, The Life-and-death Struggle People Went Through, Is Now Like Something From The Distant Past. We're So Caught Up In Our Everyday Lives That Events Of The Past, Like Ancient Stars That Have Burned Out, Are No Longer In Orbit Around Our Minds. There Are Just Too Many Things We Have To Think About Every Day, Too Many New Things We Have To Learn. New Styles, New Information, New Technology, New Terminology ... But Still, No Matter How Much Time Passes, No Matter What Takes Place In The Interim, There Are Some Things We Can Never Assign To Oblivion, Memories We Can Never Rub Away. They Remain With Us Forever, Like A Touchstone. And For Me, What Happened In The Woods That Day Is One Of These.

Never Trust A Man Who Carries A Handkerchief, I Always Say. One Of Many Prejudicial Rules Of Thumb.

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Only The Dead Stay Seventeen Forever.

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Isn't Life Strange? There Are People Who Have So Many Leftover Clothes They Can't Stuff Them All In Their Wardrobe. And Then There Are People Like Me, Whose Socks Never Match.

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I Wonder What Ants Do On Rainy Days?

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Like Flowers Scattered In A Storm, A Man's Life Is A Long Farewell.

If You Think About It, An Unfair Society Is A Society That Makes It Possible For You To Exploit Your Abilities To The Limit.

But If You Knew You Might Not Be Able To See It Again Tomorrow, Everything Would Suddenly Become Special And Precious, Wouldn’t It?

What A Terrible Thing It Is To Wound Someone You Really Care For And To Do It So Unconsciously.

Letters Are Just Pieces Of Paper," I Said. "burn Them, And What Stays In Your Heart Will Stay; Keep Them, And What Vanishes Will Vanish.

I'm Always Tripped Up By The Eternal Who Am I?

Everyone May Be Ordinary, But They're Not Normal.

The Heavy Smell Of Flower Petals Stroked The Walls Of My Lungs.

The Pillow Smells Like The Sunlight, A Precious Smell.

We Can, If We So Choose, Wander Aimlessly Over The Continent Of The Arbitrary. Rootless As Some Winged Seed Blown About On A Serendipitous Spring Breeze.

All I Do Is Keep On Running In My Own Cozy, Homemade Void, My Own Nostalgic Silence. And This Is A Pretty Wonderful Thing. No Matter What Anybody Else Says.

Listen. I May Not Be Much, But I'm All I've Got. Maybe You Need A Magnifying Glass To Find My Face In My High School Graduation Photo. Maybe I Haven't Got Any Family Or Friends. Yes, Yes, I Know All That. But, Strange As It Might Seem, I'm Not Entirely Dissatisfied With Life... I Feel Pretty Much At Home With What I Am. I Don't Want To Go Anywhere. I Don't Want Any Unicorns Behind Fences.

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My Face, My Self, What Would They Mean To Anybody? Just Another Stiff. So This Self Of Mine Passes Some Other's Self On The Street - What Do We Have To Say To Each Other? Hey There! Hi Ya!that's About It. Nobody Raises A Hand. No One Turns Around To Take Another Look.

I Just Gave Them A Little Scare. A Touch Of Psychological Terror. As Joseph Conrad Once Wrote, True Terror Is The Kind That Men Feel Towards Their Imagination. (from Super-frog Saves Tokyo)

Tell Me How You Could Say Such A Thing, She Said, Staring Down At The Ground Beneath Her Feet. You're Not Telling Me Anything I Don't Know Already. 'relax Your Body, And The Rest Of You Will Lighten Up.' What's The Point Of Saying That To Me? If I Relaxed My Body Now, I'd Fall Apart. I've Always Lived Like This, And It's The Only Way I Know How To Go On Living. If I Relaxed For A Second, I'd Never Find My Way Back. I'd Go To Pieces, And The Pieces Would Be Blown Away. Why Can't You See That? How Can You Talk About Watching Over Me If You Can't See That?

Only Where There Is Disillusionment And Depression And Sorrow Does Happiness Arise; Without The Despair Of Loss, There Is No Hope.

You're Afraid Of Imagination And Even More Afraid Of Dreams. Afraid Of The Resposibility That Begins In Dreams. But You Have To Sleep And Dreams Are A Part Of Sleep. When You're Awake You Can Suppress Imagination But You Can't Supress Dreams.

If Writing Novels Is Like Planting A Forest, Then Writing Short Stories Is More Like Planting A Garden.

Somewhere In His Body--perhaps In The Marrow Of His Bones--he Would Continue To Feel Her Absence.

I’ve Built A Wall Around Me, Never Letting Anybody Inside And Trying Not To Venture Outside Myself

You Don't Have To Judge The Whole World By Your Own Standards. Not Everybody Is Like You, You Know.

In Japan They Prefer The Realistic Style. They Like Answers And Conclusions, But My Stories Have None. I Want To Leave Them Wide Open To Every Possibility. I Think My Readers Understand That Openness.

Dreaming Is The Day Job Of Novelists, But Sharing Our Dreams Is A Still More Important Task For Us. We Cannot Be Novelists Without This Sense Of Sharing Something.

In A Place Far Away From Anyone Or Anywhere, I Drifted Off For A Moment.

It Was A Narrow World, A World That Was Standing Still. But The Narrower It Became, The More It Betook Of Stillness, The More This World That Enveloped Me Seemed To Overflow With Things And People That Could Only Be Called Strange. They Had Been There All The While, It Seemed, Waiting In The Shadows For Me To Stop Moving. And Every Time The Wind-up Bird Came To My Yard To Wind Its Spring, The World Descendedmore Deeply Into Chaos.

A Person Learns How To Love Himself Through The Simple Acts Of Loving And Being Loved By Someone Else.

No Matter How Far You Travel, You Can Never Get Away From Yourself.

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.

There Weren't Any Curtains In The Windows, And The Books That Didn't Fit Into The Bookshelf Lay Piled On The Floor Like A Bunch Of Intellectual Refugees.

It Seemed To Me That This World Has A Serious Shortage Of Both Logic And Kindness.

Loneliness Becomes An Acid That Eats Away At You.

What I'd Like To Be Is A Unique Writer Who's Different From Everybody Else. I Want To Be A Writer Who Tells Stories Unlike Other Writers'.

If I Have Left A Wound Inside You, It Is Not Just Your Wound But Mine As Well.

Sometimes We Don't Need Words. Rather, It's Words That Need Us. If We Were No Longer Here, Words Would Lose Their Whole Function. They Would End Up As Words That Are Never Spoken, And Words That Aren't Spoken Are No Longer Words. - (where I'm Likely To Find It)

Everything Passes. Nobody Gets Anything For Keeps. And That's How We've Got To Live.

We Were, The Two Of Us, Still Fragmentary Beings, Just Beginning To Sense The Presence Of An Unexpected, To Be-aquired Reality That Would Fill Us And Make Us Whole.

While They're Still Alive, People Can Become Ghosts.

You Can See A Person's Whole Life In The Cancer They Get.

I Don't Know A Whole Lot About Symbolism. There Seems To Me To Be A Potential Danger In Symbolism. I Feel More Comfortable With Metaphors And Similes.

Strong And Independent? I’m Neither. I’m Just Being Pushed Along By Reality, Whether I Like It Or Not.

I Wasn't Particularly Afraid Of Death Itself. As Shakespeare Said, Die This Year And You Don't Have To Die The Next.

My Heroes Don't Have Anything Special. They Have Something To Tell Other People But They Don't Know How, So They Talk To Themselves.

What The World Needs Is A Set Villain That People Can Point At And Say, “it’s All Your Fault!

I'm The Kind Of Person Who Has To Totally Commit To Whatever I Do.

What Makes Us The Most Normal," Said Reiko, "is Knowing That We're Not Normal.

I Write My Novels Personally, Desperately And Non-negligently. When I Write My Novels, I Think About My Novels Only, And Never Do Other Works.

Whether It's Good For Anything Or Not, Cool Or Totally Uncool, In The Final Analysis What's Most Important Is What You Can't See But Can Feel In Your Heart.

Listening To The Music While Stretching Her Body Close To Its Limit, She Was Able To Attain A Mysterious Calm. She Was Simultaneously The Torturer And The Tortured, The Forcer And The Forced. This Sense Of Inner-directed Self-sufficiency Was What She Wanted Most Of All. It Gave Her Deep Solace.

I Don't Think Jealousy Has Much Of A Connection With Real, Objective Conditions. Like If You're Fortunate You're Not Jealous, But If Life Hasn't Blessed You, You Are Jealous. Jealousy Doesn't Work That Way. It's More Like A Tumor Secretly Growing Inside Us That Gets Bigger And Bigger, Beyond All Reason. Even If You Find Out It's There, There's Nothing You Can Do To Stop It.

Sometimes I Get Real Lonely Sleeping With You.

It Seems To Me That Very Sad Things Always Contain An Element Of The Comical

She's Kind Of Funny Looking. Her Face Is Out Of Balance--broad Forehead, Button Nose, Freckled Cheeks, And Pointy Ears. A Slammed-together, Rough Sort Of Face You Can't Ignore. Still, The Whole Package Isn't So Bad. For All I Know Maybe She's Not So Wild About Her Own Looks, But She Seems Comfortable With Who She Is, And That's The Important Thing.

You Might Think You Made A New World Or A New Self, But Your Old Self Is Always Gonna Be There, Just Below The Surface, And If Something Happens, It'll Stick Its Head Out And Say 'hi.' You Don't Seem To Realize That. You Were Made Somewhere Else.

My Point Is: In This Whole Wide World The Only Person You Can Depend On Is You.

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