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In the Miso Soup QUOTES

In the Miso Soup QUOTES

1 " But why is it that if you imagine a baby who smells of milk, for example, you can't help smiling? Why is there such an agreement around the world about what is or isn't a foul smell? Who decided what smells bad? Is it impossible that somewhere in this world there are people who, if they sat next to a homeless fellow they'd get the urge to snuggle up to him, but if they sat next to a baby they'd get an urge to kill it? "

― Ryū Murakami , In the Miso Soup

2 " But what I did sense was an emptiness like a black hole inside of him, and there was no predicting what might emerge from a place like that. "

― Ryū Murakami , In the Miso Soup

3 " After listening to a lot of these stories, I began to think that American loneliness is a completely different creature from anything we experience in this country, and it made me glad I was born Japanese. The type of loneliness where you need to keep struggling to accept a situation is fundamentally different from the sort you know you'll get through if you just hang in there. "

― Ryū Murakami , In the Miso Soup

4 " That was with me for years--feeling I wasn't myself. And I do think I wasn't my real self then. Of course, I'm not sure there is such a thing as a real self. You could ransack your innards looking for the real you and never find it--slice yourself open and all you'll find is blood and muscle and bone. "

― Ryū Murakami , In the Miso Soup

5 " You don't know what cold is until you've experienced the cold you feel when the blood is draining out of your body. "

― Ryū Murakami , In the Miso Soup

6 " When you're in an extreme situation you tend to avoid facing it by getting caught up in little details. Like a guy who's decided to commit suicide and boards a train only to become obsessed with whether he remembered to lock the door when he left home. "

― Ryū Murakami , In the Miso Soup

7 " And sometimes ignorance is even harder to deal with than deliberate evil. "

― Ryū Murakami , In the Miso Soup

8 " I wonder why people you have to meet have to be such liars. They lie as if their lives depended on it. "

― Ryū Murakami , In the Miso Soup

9 " What makes somebody nice or unpleasant to be around is the way they communicate. When people are fucked up, their communication is fucked up. "

― Ryū Murakami , In the Miso Soup

10 " They needed a reason why a little kid would commit murder, someone or something to point the finger at, and I think they were relieved when they hit upon horror movies as the culprit. But there's no reason a child commits murder, just as there's no reason a child gets lost. What would it be - because his parents weren't watching him? That's not a reason, it's just a step in the process. "

― Ryū Murakami , In the Miso Soup

11 " All Americans have something lonely about them. I don't know what the reason might be, except maybe that they're all descended from immigrants. "

― Ryū Murakami , In the Miso Soup

12 " When you're a kid, getting lost isn't just an event or a situation, it's like a career move. You get this thrill of anxiety and fear and a feeling that you've done something that can never be undone. "

― Ryū Murakami , In the Miso Soup

13 " He invited me to his apartment in the wee hours one morning and pulled out a set of children's building blocks. It seems he used to ride around and around on the Yamanote Line with them, building castles on the floor of the train. "

― Ryū Murakami , In the Miso Soup

14 " Very few people of our generation or the next will reach adulthood without experiencing the sort of unhappiness you can't really deal with on your own. We're still in the minority, so the media lump us together as "The Oversensitive Young", or whatever the latest catchphrase is, but eventually that will change. "

― Ryū Murakami , In the Miso Soup

15 " Did you know that only a tiny minority of viruses cause illness in humans? No one knows how many viruses there are, but their real role, when you get right down to it, is to aid in mutations, to create diversity among life forms. I've read a lot of books on the subject-when you don't need much sleep you have a lot of time to read-and I can tell you that if it weren't for viruses, mankind would never have evolved on this planet. Some viruses get right inside the DNA and change your genetic code, did you know that? And no one can say for sure that HIV, for example, won't one day prove to have been rewriting our genetic code in a way that's essential to our survival as a race. I'm a man who consciously commits murders and scares the hell out of people and makes them reconsider everything, so I'm definitely malignant, yet I think I play a necessary role in this world. "

― Ryū Murakami , In the Miso Soup

16 " The feeling that the world was at my feet and the feeling that I alone was cut off from the world, the sense of power and the anxiety, had both stayed with me ever since that evening at the pond. "

― Ryū Murakami , In the Miso Soup

17 " Of course, I'm not sure there is such a thing as a real self. You could ransack your innards looking for the real you and never find it - slice yourself open and all you'll find is blood and muscle and bone... "

― Ryū Murakami , In the Miso Soup

18 " I remembered reading in a hard-boiled detective novel that if you drink in the same place two nights in a row, the bartender and waiters will remember your face. "

― Ryū Murakami , In the Miso Soup

19 " I wondered if there were planets where it's okay to murder people. I decided there must be, reminding myself that in war, after all, killers are heroes. "

― Ryū Murakami , In the Miso Soup

20 " Malevolence is born of negative feelings like lonliness and sadness and anger. It comes from an emptiness inside you that feels as if it's been carved out with a knife; an emptiness you're left with when something very important has been taken away from you. "

― Ryū Murakami , In the Miso Soup