• a story is a leaf from the tree of tales - Tolkien
• information is restricted, and history is constantly being rewritten.

whenever a new history is written, the old histories all have to be thrown out. in the process, words are remade, and the meanings of current words are changed. what with history being rewritten so often, nobody knows what is true anymore. they lose track of who is an enemy and who an ally.

• robbing people of their actual history is the same as robbing them of part of themselves
• our memory is made up of individual memories and our collective memories. the two are intimately linked. and history is our collective memory. if our collective memory is taken from us - is rewritten - we lose the ability to sustain our true selves

the roaring sea is cold and colorless in appearance, and the tall grey waves pound upon the sand, as if wishing to say in despair: oh god, why did you create us?

• it is beyond comprehension who the waves are roaring for, who listens to them at nights here, what they want, and, finally, who they would roar for when i was gone. there on the shore, one is overcome not by connected, logical thoughts, but by reflections and reveries. it is a sinister sensation, and yet at the very same time you feel the desire to stand forever looking at the monotonous movement of the waves and listening to their threatening roar.
• it was probably Chekhov who said that the novelist is not someone who answers questions but someone who asks them
• that's what the world is, after all: an endless battle of contrasting memories
• the thing i'm most afraid of is me. of not knowing what I'm going to do. Of not knowing what I'm doing right now.
• the Tibetan wheel of passions. as the wheel turns, the values and feelings on the outer rim rise and fal, shining or sinking into darkness. But true love stays fastened to the axle and doesn't move.
• the Gilyaks are like the Ainu and American Indians: they don't have writing. They don't leave records. I'm the same. Once it gets written down, the story is not mine anymore.
• lunatic means to have your sanity temporarily seized by the luna, which is moon in Latin. In nineteenth-century England, if you were a certified lunatic and you committed a crime, the severity of the crime would be reduced a notch. the idea was that the crime was not so much the responsibility of the person himself as that he was led astray by the moonlight.
• what we call the present is given shape by an accumulation of the past.
• the moon lives in the lining of your skin - pablo neruda
• the way i see it, a person isn't nothing more than a scarecrow... the only difference between one that stands up good and one that blows over is what kind of a stick they're stuck up there on.
• by the grace of some miracle i surely did not yet deserve
• the cherokees believed god was in trees
• head filled with the white fluffy stuff inside of life preservers
• it attached itself to me by its little hands like roots sucking on dry dirt
• I could never figure out why men thought they could impress a woman by making the world out to be such a big dangerous deal. I mean, we've got to live in the exact same world every damn day of the week, don't we?
• it's too early in the morning for bad news
• eating like a house on fire
• whatever you want the most, it's going to be the worst thing for you
• Did you ever have this feeling when you're standing next to a cliff, say, or by an upstairs window, and you can just picture yourself jumping out?
• ackero-phobia doesn't have anything to do with being afraid you'll holler out something god-awful in church, does it?

No, I said. I think what you mean is a totally different phobia. Fear that the things you imagine will turn real.

• i'd forgotten how trees full of bird sounds make you sense the world differently: that life didn't just stop at eye level.
• Esperana means to wait, and also to hope. That in Spanish the word means both things.
• In Spanish, the way to say you have a baby is to say that you give it to the light.
• only two things are worth making so much noise about: death and sex. He had the devil in him tonight.
• a night blooming cereus
• the national bird of Guatemala - quetzal, if you try to keep it in a cage, it dies
• The Mayans had astronomical observatories and performed brain surgery
• a human being can be good or bad or right or wrong, maybe. But how can you say a person is illegal?
• a kind of mental illness you get from seeing too much horizon
• a man, a plan, a canal: Panama.

ale was I ere I saw Elba - what Napoleon supposedly said when he was first sent into exile.

• there are more people alive now than have died in all of human history. In other words, if everyone wanted to play Hamlet at once, they couldn't, because there aren't enough skulls
• my Stuff That Happened to Me scrapbook
• there's nothing wrong with not understanding yourself
• do you like it when it rains? what natural disasters fascinate you? are you ever afraid of the dark? do you have any tattoos? where were you born, and do you think that it matters where somebody is born? what is your earliest memory? did you ever have a part in a school play? do you prefer to take the bus or walk? what is your favorite musical instrument? where do you most like to be kissed? fight or flight? please tell me that you like to read. did your parents read stories to you before you went to bed? do you speak any other languages other than your own? do you like what you see when you look in the mirror? or do you make funny faces? would you ever enlist in the army? do you like to write in pencil or pen? have you ever had a pen-pal? what do you wish you could invent? do you like to celebrate holidays? where is the place where you think the best? what frustrates you the most? do you collect anything? would you ever live on a boat? in a treehouse? in a van? did you ever run away from home? if you joined the circus, what would your role be? have you ever had the same dream more than once? do you have any superstitions? do you believe in horoscopes?
• i would like to stand behind your chair as you write, run my fingers through your hair, gently kiss the top of your ear
• oh well, brother, but we have to correct and direct nature, and, but for that, we should drown in an ocean of prejudice.
• when reason fails, the devil helps!
• so probably men led to execution clutch mentally at every object that meets them on their way
• the conviction that all his faculties, even memory, and the simplest power of reflection were faling him began to be an insufferable torture
• "Murakami is like a magician who explains what he's doing as he performs the trick and still makes you believe he has supernatural powers . . . But while anyone can tell a story that resembles a dream, it's the rare artist, like this one, who can make us feel that we are dreaming it ourselves." --The New York Times Book Review