- in an instant — regardless of whether their dental plan covered the costs — they fell in love.
- true, at times her style resembled a patchwork quilt sewn by a group of stubborn old ladies, each with her own tastes and complaints, working in grim silence. add to this her sometimes manic-depressive personality, and things occasionally got out of control. as if this weren’t enough, sumire was dead set on creating a massive nineteenth-century-style total novel, a kind of portmanteau packed with every possible phenomenon in order to capture the soul and human destiny.
- “my head is like some ridiculous barn packed full of stuff i want to write about,” she said. “images, scenes, snatches of words… in my mind they’re all glowing, all alive. write! they shout at me. a great new story is about to be born, i can feel it. it’ll transport me to some brand-new place. problem is, once i sit at my desk and put them all down on paper, i realize something vital is missing. it doesn’t crystallize—no crystals, just pebbles. and I’m not transported anywhere.”
- “writing novels is much the same. you gather up bones and make your gate, but no matter how wonderful the gate might be, that alone doesn’t make it a living, breathing novel. a story is not something of this world. a real story requires a kind of magical baptism to link the world on this side with the world on the other side.”
- i must be in love with this woman, she realized with a start. no mistake about it. ice is cold; roses are red. i’m in love. and this love is about to carry me off somewhere. the current’s too overpowering; i don’t have any choice. it may very well be a special place, some place i’ve never seen before. danger may be lurking there, something that may end up wounding me deeply, fatally. i might end up losing everything. but there’s no turning back. i can only go with the flow. even if it means I’ll be burned up, gone for ever.
- i’ve always been disturbed by the thought that i’m not painting a very objective picture of myself.
- “i hardly recognize you these days,” i said. “it’s that season,” she said disinterestedly, sipping at her drink through a straw. “what season?” i asked. “a delayed adolescence, i guess. when i get up in the morning and see my face in the mirror, it looks like someone else’s. if i’m not careful, i might end up left behind.”
- do you know what ‘sputnik’ means in russian? ‘travelling companion’.
- “and it came to me then. that we were wonderful travelling companions, but in the end no more than lonely lumps of metal on their own separate orbits. from far off they look like beautiful shooting stars, but in reality they’re nothing more than prisons, where each of us is locked up alone, going nowhere. when the orbits of these two satellites of ours happened to cross paths, we could be together. maybe even open our hearts to each other. but that was only for the briefest moment. in the next instant we’d be in absolute solitude. until we burned up and became nothing.”
- understanding is but the sum of our misunderstandings.
- in dreams there are hardly ever collisions. even if there are, they don’t hurt. reality is different. reality bites.
- when the sam peckinpah film the wild bunch premiered, a woman journalist raised her hand at the press conference and asked the following: “why in the world do you have to show so much blood all over the place?” she was pretty worked up about it. one of the actors, ernest borgnine, looked a bit perplexed and fielded the question. “lady, did you ever see anyone shot by a gun without bleeding?”
- every story has a time to be told, i convinced her. otherwise you’ll be forever a prisoner to the secret inside you.
- “i was alive in the past, and i’m alive now, sitting here talking to you. but what you see here isn’t really me. this is just a shadow of who i was. you are really living. but i’m not. even these words i’m saying right now sound empty, like an echo.”
- miu was like an empty room after everyone’s left. something incredibly important — the same something that pulled in sumire like a tornado, that shook my heart as i stood on the deck of the ferry — had disappeared from miu for good. leaving behind not life, but its absence. not the warmth of something alive, but the silence of memory.
- so that’s how we live our lives. no matter how deep and fatal the loss, no matter how important the thing that’s stolen from us — that’s snatched right out of our hands — even if we are left completely changed people with only the outer layer of skin from before, we continue to play out our lives this way, in silence. we draw ever nearer to our allotted span of time, bidding it farewell as it trails off behind. repeating, often adroitly, the endless deeds of the everyday. leaving behind a feeling of immeasurable emptiness.
- i dream. sometimes i think that’s the only right thing to do. to dream, to live in the world of dreams — just as sumire said.
feb 27 2022 ∞
feb 27 2022 +