One of the greatest and interesting experience about reading a novel is that it gives words and better expressions to my past experience and memory that I myself get a chance relive them through the author’s language. Words and language are magical, that I am glad that great writers take advantage of them. I’m happy to be a mere beneficiary.

Norwegian Wood by Haruki Murakami is a book I finished reading today. I felt I need to find a way to bring in all the highlighted words, phrases and conversations I made during the reading process.

These are the words I want to record and keep with me for a long time, hence putting it out here. Read the select quotes below and who knows what memory they might trigger in you? Happy reading!

Straight from the author

“I suppose I don’t really understand you yet,” I said. “I’m not all that smart. It takes me a while to understand things. But if I do have the time, I will come to understand you—better than anyone else in the world.”

“I suppose I don’t really understand you yet,” I said. “I’m not all that smart. It takes me a while to understand things. But if I do have the time, I will come to understand you—better than anyone else in the world.”

“I was impressed by the variety of dreams and goals that life could offer. This was one of the very first new impressions I received when I came to Tokyo for the first time.”

“But death was a fact, a serious fact, no matter how you looked at it. Stuck inside this suffocating contradiction, I went on endlessly spinning in circles. Those were strange days, now that I look back at them. In the midst of life, everything revolved around around death”.

“The one thing I do have, though, is curiosity. I want to see what I can do out there in the big, tough world.”

“What does it mean to be a gentleman? How do you define it?” “A gentleman is someone who does not what he wants to do but what he should do.”

“Do you think you weren’t loved enough?”   She tilted her head and looked at me. Then she gave a sharp, little nod.   “Somewhere between “not enough’ and “not at all’. I was always hungry for love. Just once, I wanted to know what it was like to get my fill of it—to be fed so much love I couldn’t take any more. Just once. But they never gave that to me. Never, not once. If I tried to cuddle up and beg for something, they’d just shove me away and yell at me”

“It’s not that I don’t believe in contemporary literature,” he added, “but I don’t want to waste valuable time reading any book that has not had the baptism of time. Life is too short.”

“Her arms tightened around me at the end, when at last she broke her silence. Her cry was the saddest sound of orgasm I had ever heard.”

“Hey, Kizuki, I thought, you’re not missing a damn thing. This world is a piece of shit. The arseholes are getting good marks and helping to create a society in their own disgusting image.”

“That’s the kind of death that frightens me. The shadow of death slowly, slowly eats away at the region of life, and before you know it everything’s dark and you can’t see, and the people around you think of you as more dead than alive. I hate that. I couldn’t stand it.”

“But as with all kisses, it was not without a certain element of danger.”

“What happens when people open their hearts?” “They get better”.

“took a thin metal flask from my rucksack, let my mouth fill with the brandy it contained, allowed the warmth to move slowly down my throat to my stomach, and from there felt it spreading to every extremity. After a final sip, I closed the flask and returned it to my rucksack. Now the moonlight seemed to be swaying with the music.”

“What makes us most normal,” said Reiko, “is knowing that we’re not normal.”

“How many Sundays—how many hundreds of Sundays like this—lay ahead of me?   “Quiet, peaceful, and lonely,” I said aloud to myself.”

“Hey, I’m not a total idiot,” said Nagasawa. “Of course life frightens me sometimes. I don’t happen to take that as the premise for everything else, though. I’m going to give it 100 per cent and go as far as I can. I’ll take what I want and leave what I don’t want. That’s how I intend to live my life, and if things go bad, I’ll stop and reconsider at that point. If you think about it, an unfair society is a society that makes it possible for you to exploit your abilities to the limit.”

“Languages are like games. You learn the rules for one, and they all work the same way. Like women.”

“Hey, there, Kizuki, I thought. Unlike you, I’ve chosen to live—and to live the best I know how. Sure, it was hard for you. What the hell, it’s hard for me. Really hard. And all because you killed yourself and left Naoko behind. But that’s something I will never do. I will never, ever, turn my back on her. First of all, because I love her, and because I’m stronger than she is. And I’m just going to keep on getting stronger.   I’m going to mature. I’m going to be an adult. Because that’s what I have to do. I always used to think I’d like to stay 17 or 18 if I could.   But not any more. I’m not a teenager any more. I’ve got a sense of responsibility now. I’m not the same person I was when we used to hang out together. I’m 20 now. And I have to pay the price to go on living.”

  “Well, it’s just that life has been so cruel to us until now,” Midori said. “But that’s OK. We’re going to get back every thing it owes us.”

 “I’m finished as a human being,” she said. “All you’re looking at is the lingering memory of what I used to be. The most important part of me, what used to be inside, died years ago, and I’m just functioning by auto-memory.”