Norwegian Wood

“People are strange when you’re a stranger.”

If you’re in pitch blackness, all you can do is sit tight until your eyes get used to the dark.

What if somewhere inside me there is a dark limbo where all the truly important memories are heaped and slowly turning into mud?

that we are in here not to correct the deformation but to accustom ourselves to it: that one of our problems was our inability to recognize and accept our own deformities.

Hermann Hesse’s Beneath the Wheel

“A gentleman is someone who does not what he wants to do but what he should do.”

Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain.

Streaming in through the window, the moonlight cast long shadows and splashed the walls with a touch of diluted Indian ink.

Everything was too sharp and clear, so that I could never tell where to start – the way a map that shows too much can sometimes be useless. Now,

Death exists, not as the opposite but as a part of life. It’s a cliché translated into words, but at the time I felt it not as words but as that knot of air inside me. Death exists – in a paperweight, in four red and white balls on a pool table – and we go on living and breathing it into our lungs like fine dust.