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Quote by Haruki Murakami

“In fact, I didn't care about getting laid anymore. Wandering around Shinjuku on a noisy Saturday night, observing the mysterious energy created by a mixture of sex and alcohol, I began to feel that my own desire was a puny thing.”

Quote by Haruki Murakami

Work

Norwegian Wood

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Author

Haruki Murakami

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“Today my father still sits [in] prison. But what about all of us in our own prisons? For many of us, that's what we choose. There might not be metal bars or orange jumpsuits, but we keep ourselves locked in the prison of other people's expectations. Or we look across the street and put ourselves in the prison of wanting what those people over there have. We imprison ourselves in debt. We stay in our prisons because they're comfortable and don't challenge us.”

“The temptation to fulfil all desires was, in the past, that of evil; temptation by the devil. Today it is good which presides over that fulfilment, but it is no longer the fulfilment of a desire or an impulse of our own. We no longer aspire to anything; we are aspirated, sucked up, by the void. The logic of distinction is, ultimately, a precious vestige of the bygone time of signs and sign-value, the loss of which, though imperceptible in the equivalence of images, is even more serious than the loss of the real. Prestige, challenge, rivalry, privileges - it was, at bottom, the golden age of symbolic violence, the only antidote to democratic erosion and the great game of equality of opportunity. It is doubtless as absurd to wish to eliminate that violence as any other. Is it better to stop the haemorrhage and live in a state of perpetual transfusion?”

“I'm not afraid of you," she said. She didn't look afraid of me. She looked beautiful, moonlit, tempting, smelling of peppermint and soap and skin. I'd spent eleven years watching the rest of my pack become animals, pushing down my instincts, controlling myself, fighting to stay human, fighting to do the right thing. As if reading my thoughts, she said, "Can you tell me it's only the wolf in you that wants to kiss me?" All of me wanted to kiss her hard enough to make me disappear.”