South of the Border, West of the Sun - Quotes

South of the Border, West of the Sun - Haruki Murakami (1999)

 "But I didn't understand then. That I could hurt somebody so badly she would never recover. That a person can, just by living, damage another human being beyond repair"

"If I stayed here, something inside me would be lost for ever - something I couldn't afford to lose. It was like a vague dream, a burning unfulfilled desire. The kind of dream people have only when they're seventeen."

"... 'Did you see that Disney film in elementary school - The Living Desert?'

'Yes', I answered.

'Our world's exactly the same. Rainfalls and the flowers bloom. No rain, they wither up. Bugs are eaten by lizards, lizards are eaten by birds. But in the end every one of them dies. They die and dry up. One generation dies, and the next one takes over. That's how it goes. Lots of different ways to live. And lots of different ways to die. But in the end that doesn't make a bit of difference. All that remains is a desert.'

'Everyone just keeps on disappearing. Some things just vanish, as if they were cut away. Others fade slowly into the mist. And all that remains is a desert.'"

"'You're here,' I continued.

'At least you look as if you're here. But maybe you aren't. Maybe it's just your shadow. The real you may be somewhere else. Or maybe you already disappeared, a long long time ago. I reach out my hand to see, but you've hidden yourself behind a cloud of probablys.'"

"'I read this somewhere a long time ago. Maybe in junior high - I can't for the life of me recall what book I read it in. Anyway, it affects farmers living in Siberia. Try to imagine this. You're a farmer, living all alone on the Siberian tundra. Day after day you plough your fields. As far as the eye can see, nothing. To the north, the horizon, to the east, the horizon, to the south, to the west, more of the same. Every morning, when the sun rises in the east, you go out to work in your fields. When it's directly overhead, you take a break for lunch. When it sinks in the west, you go home to sleep.

... And then one day something inside you dies.'

'What do you mean?'

She shook her head. 'I don't know. Something. Day after day you watch the sun rise in the east, pass across the sky, then sink in the west, and something breaks inside you and dies. You throw you plough aside and your head completely empty of thought. You begin walking toward the west. Heading toward a land that lies west of the sun, like someone possessed, you walk on, day after day, not eating or drinking, until you collapse on the ground and die. That's hysteria siberiana.'"

"Because memory and sensations are so uncertain, so biased, we always rely on a certain reality - call it an alternate reality - to prove the reality of events. To what extent facts we recognize as such really as they seem, and to what extent these are facts merely because we label them as such, is an impossible distinction to draw. Therefore, in order to pin down reality as reality, we need another reality to relativize the first. Yet that other reality requires a third reality to serve as its grounding. An endless chain is created within our consciousness, and it is the maintenance of this chain which produces the sensation that we are actually here, that we ourselves exist. But something can happen to sever that chain and we are at a loss. What is real? Is really on this side of the break in the chain? Or over there, on the other side?"

"Inside that darkness, I saw rain falling on the sea. Rain softly falling on a vast sea, with no one there to see it. The rain strikes the surface of the sea, yet even the fish don't know it is raining."