1Q84 (Vintage International)

This is what it means to live on. When granted hope, a person uses it as fuel, as a guidepost to life. It is impossible to live without hope.

Nobody’s easier to fool, Ushikawa thought, than the person who is convinced that he is right.

The sun begins to sink. It is time for the cats to come. He knows that he is irretrievably lost. This is no town of cats, he finally realizes. It is the place

“everybody feels safe belonging not to the excluded minority but to the excluding majority.

point. It teaches me something—or tries to. People need things like that to go on living—mental landscapes that have meaning for them, even if they can’t explain them in words. Part of why we live is to come up with explanations for these things. That’s what I think.

What did it mean for a person to be free? she would often ask herself. Even if you managed to escape from one cage, weren’t you just in another, larger one?

“If you can love someone with your whole heart, even one person, then there’s salvation in life. Even if you can’t get together with that person.”

In Search of Lost Time

Tengo was able to relax when he was with older women. Not having to take the lead in everything seemed to lift a weight from his shoulders.