Paper Man

Each death, up until the moment of our own, is miraculous.

Reading, his therapist had suggested, had likely been his first drug.

I need the world to have a surface, the same surface everyone sees. I don't like feeling like I'm always about to fall through, into something else.

Philosophers in the know are even more dangerous than computer scientists: they tend to become existential magnets for weird shit.

Crazy is the price you pay for having an imagination.

Life is full of stories. Or maybe life is only stories.

Jiko felt like that when she learned that her only son was going to be killed in the war. I know, because I told her about the fish in my stomach, and she said she knew exactly what I was talking about, and that she had a fish, too, for many years. In fact, she said she had lots of fishes, some that were small like sardines, some that were medium-sized like carp, and other ones that were as big as bluefin tuna, but the biggest fish of all belonged to Haruki, and it was more like the size of a whale. She also said that after she became a nun and renounced the world, she learned how to open up her heart so that the whale could swim away.

I was still thinking about what she said about waves, and it made me sad because I knew that her little wave was not going to last and soon she would join the sea again, and even though I know you can't hold on to water, still I gripper her fingers a little more tightly to keep her from leaking away.

Do you have to live to be a hundred to really grow up?

The problem was you couldn't power a computer or surf the web with lamp oil.

In Japan, some words have kotodama, which are spirits that live inside a word and give it a special power. The kotodama of ‘now’ felt like a slippery fish, a slick fat tuna with a big belly and a smallish head and tail. 'Now' felt like a big fish swallowing a little fish, and I wanted to catch it and make it stop.

This is the chapter in which he praises his young monks for their commitment to a path of awakening and explicates the granular nature of time: the 6,400,099,980 moments that constitute a single day.

Truth be told, the planet’s most victorious organisms have always been microscopic. In all the encounters between Davids and Goliaths, was there ever a time when a Goliath won?

When you get right down to it, food is practically the whole story every time.

"I'll tell you what the human soul is, Mary," he whispered. "Animals don't have one. It's the part of you that knows when your brain isn't working right. I always knew, Mary. There wasn't anything I could do about it, but I always knew."