Book//mark – The Strange Library | Haruki Murakami, 1983
Haruki Murakami, The Strange Library, 1983 / Haruki Murakami, 1983
“Ever since I was little my mother had told me, if you don’t know something, go to the library and look it up.”
“Mr. Sheep Man,” I asked. “Why would that old man want to eat my brains?”
“Because brains packed with knowledge are yummy, that’s why. They are nice and creamy. And sort of grainy at the same time”.”
“The sheep man has his world. I have mine. And you have yours, too. Am I right? “That you are.” So just because I don’t exist in the sheep man’s world, it doesn’t mean that I don’t exist at all. “I get it,” I said. “Our worlds are all jumbled together—your world, my world, the sheep man’s world. Sometimes they overlap and sometimes they don’t. That’s what you mean, right?”
“I can read the two of you as easily as I can a watermelon patch in broad daylight.”
“Every time I get new shoes, it takes me a while to get used to their noise.”
“The library was even more hushed than usual.”
“No matter what the situation may be, I still take pleasure in witnessing the joy of others.”
“Like a blind dolphin, the night of the new moon silently drew near.”
“I’m not very good at giving anyone a clear no.”
“Why do I act like this, agreeing when I really disagree, letting people force me to do things I don’t want to do?”
“She didn’t answer. Instead, she smiled sweetly. It was a smile so radiant that the air seemed to thin around it.”
“She looked as if she were reading the right-hand page with her right eye, and the left-hand page with her left.”
“She was so pretty that looking at her made my eyes hurt.”
“It was a small soft hand. I thought my heart might break in two.”
“Why did something like this have to happen to me? All I did was go to the library to borrow some books.”
“I turned to run, but I didn’t actually take a step, even though I wanted to. That wasn’t the way I was raised. My mother taught me that if you knock on a door, you have to wait there until someone answers.”
“At the same time, my anxiety had turned into an anxiety quite lacking in anxiousness. And any anxiety that is not especially anxious is, in the end, an anxiety hardly worth mentioning.”
“Enough of your prattle,” the old man said. “I cannot abide people who conjure up a raft of excuses, disparaging the efforts of those who have gone out of their way to help them. Such people are common trash.”
“I lie here by myself in the dark at two o’clock in the morning and think about that cell in the library. About how it feels to be alone, and the depth of the darkness surrounding me. Darkness as pitch black as the night of the new moon.”
“The tricky thing about mazes is that you don’t know if you’ve chosen the right path until the very end. If it turns out you were wrong, it’s usually too late to go back and start again. That’s the problem with mazes.”
Haruki Murakami, The Strange Library, 1983
Also:
Days [ ) Dawn in Mongolia | Haruki Murakami, 1994-95
Days [ ) The other me | Haruki Murakami, 2006
