I had a unicorn skull in my hands...

...Quotes from my favorite Murakami:

Deep rivers run quiet.

Open your eyes, train your ears, use your head. If a mind you have, then use it while you can.

Open your eyes, train your ears, use your head. If a mind you have, then use it while you can.

But like a boat with a twisted rudder, I kept coming back to the same place. I wasn’t going anywhere. I was myself, waiting on the shore for me to return.

…my head swimming with abstract shapes. Do I occupy the body of another? Everything is so ponderously heavy, so vague.

The absence of fighting or hatred or desire also means the opposites do not exist either. No joy, no communion, no love. Only where there is disillusionment and depression and sorrow does happiness arise; without the despair of loss, there is no hope.

Kindness and a caring mind are two separate qualities. Kindness is manners. It is superficial custom, an acquired practice. Not so the mind. The mind is deeper, stronger and, I believe, it is far more inconstant.

I like the moments of darkness before dawn… Probably because it’s a clean slate. Clean and unused.

I wasn’t particularly afraid of death itself. As Shakespeare said, die this year and you don’t have to die the next.

----Hard-boiled Wonderland and the End of the World