Norwegian Wood (Vintage International)

Boris Vian

That’s why you need to grab whatever chance you have for happiness where you find it, and not worry too much about other people. My experience tells me that we get no more than two or three such chances in a lifetime, and if we let them go, we regret it for the rest of our lives.

“It’s ’cause I hated the place so much. I wasn’t going to let it beat me. I figured, let it get me once and I’d be finished. I was scared I’d just keep slipping down and down.

How many Sundays—how many hundreds of Sundays like this—lay ahead of me? “Quiet, peaceful, and lonely,” I said aloud to myself. On Sundays, I didn’t wind my spring.

No, we weren’t lovers, but in a way we had opened ourselves to each other even more deeply than lovers do. The thought caused me a good deal of grief. What a terrible thing it is to wound someone you really care for—and to do it so unconsciously.