— kafka on the shore

• «Memories warm you up from the inside. But they also tear you apart.»
• «If you remember me, then I don't care if everyone else forgets.»
• «And once the storm is over you won't remember how you made it through, how you managed to survive. You won't even be sure, in fact, whether the storm is really over. But one thing is certain. When you come out of the storm you won't be the same person who walked in. That's what this storm's all about.»
• «Silence, I discover, is something you can actually hear.»
• «Beyond the edge of the world there’s a space where emptiness and substance neatly overlap, where past and future form a continuous, endless loop. And, hovering about, there are signs no one has ever read, chords no one has ever heard.»
• «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.»

— norwegian wood

• «If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking.»
• «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.»
• «I want you always to remember me. Will you remember that I existed, and that I stood next to you here like this?»
• «If you're in pitch blackness, all you can do is sit tight until your eyes get used to the dark.»
• «If I have left a wound inside you, it is not just your wound but mine as well.»

— the wind-up bird chronicle

• «But even so, every now and then I would feel a violent stab of loneliness. The very water I drink, the very air I breathe, would feel like long, sharp needles. The pages of a book in my hands would take on the threatening metallic gleam of razor blades. I could hear the roots of loneliness creeping through me when the world was hushed at four o'clock in the morning.»
• «Memories and thoughts age, just as people do. But certain thoughts can never age, and certain memories can never fade.»

— colorless tsukuru tazaki and his years of pilgrimage

• «You can hide memories, but you can't erase the history that produced them.»
• «As we go through life we gradually discover who we are, but the more we discover, the more we lose ourselves.»
• «Some things in life are too complicated to explain in any language.»
• «till, being able to feel pain was good, he thought. It's when you can't even feel pain anymore that you're in real trouble.»

— south of the border, west of the sun

• «I think you still love me, but we can’t escape the fact that I’m not enough for you. I knew this was going to happen. So I’m not blaming you for falling in love with another woman. I’m not angry, either. I should be, but I’m not. I just feel pain. A lot of pain. I thought I could imagine how much this would hurt, but I was wrong.»
• «or a long time, she held a special place in my heart. I kept this special place just for her, like a "Reserved" sign on a quiet corner table in a restaurant. Despite the fact that I was sure I'd never see her again.»
• «The sad truth is that certain types of things can't go backward. Once they start going forward, no matter what you do, they can't go back the way they were. If even one little thing goes awry, then that's how it will stay forever.»