1Q84: Books 1 and 2

extreme paucity of expression.

St. Matthew Passion,’”

inscrutability

And each time he finished a sentence, there was a tiny but meaningful lump of silence left behind. This lump floated there, enclosed in the car’s restricted space like an imaginary miniature cloud, giving Aomame a strangely unsettled feeling.

Human beings are ultimately nothing but carriers – passageways – for genes. They ride us into the ground like racehorses from generation to generation. Genes don’t think about what constitutes good or evil. They don’t care whether we are happy or unhappy. We’re just a means to an end for them. The only thing they think about is what is most efficie

The Tale of the Heike?”

And it was the kind of thing that loses the most important nuances when reduced to words.

“According to Chekhov,” Tamaru said, rising from his chair, “once a gun appears in a story, it has to be fired.”

Of course, reading novels was just another form of escape.