A Quote by Haruki Murakami
The little things are important, Mr. Wind-Up Bird.
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Then I noticed that my shadow was crying too, shedding clear, sharp shadow tears. Have you ever seen the shadows of tears, Mr. Wind-Up Bird? They’re nothing like ordinary shadows. Nothing at all. They come here from some other, distant world, especially for our hearts. Or maybe not. It struck me then that the tears my shadow was shedding might be the real thing, and the tears that I was shedding were just shadows. You don’t get it, I’m sure, Mr. Wind-Up Bird. When a naked seventeen-year-old girl is shedding tears in the moonlight, anything can happen. It’s true.
A regular wind-up toy world this is, I think. Once a day the wind-up bird has to come and wind the springs of this world. Alone in this fun house, only I grow old, a pale softball of death swelling inside me. Yet even as I sleep somewhere between Saturn and Uranus, wind-up birds everywhere are busy at work fulfilling their appointed rounds.
When the wind stops, kite falls but bird flies; because bird did not borrow the wind when rising!
A girl doesn't always want to go out, you know, Mr. Wind-Up Bird. Sometimes she feels like being nasty--like, if the guy's gonna wait, let him really wait.
If you were a bird, and lived on high, You'd lean on the wind when the wind came by, You'd say to the wind when it took you away: 'That's where I wanted to go today!
It was a narrow world, a world that was standing still. But the narrower it became, the more it betook of stillness, the more this world that enveloped me seemed to overflow with things and people that could only be called strange. They had been there all the while, it seemed, waiting in the shadows for me to stop moving. And every time the wind-up bird came to my yard to wind its spring, the world descendedmore deeply into chaos.
If a bird is flying for pleasure, it flies with the wind, but if it meets danger it turns and faces the wind, in order that it may rise higher.
There were little Charlie Chaplins that you would wind up, and they would walk. I remember vividly. I was sitting in the high chair with the little tray in front of me. My parents would wind it up, and it would walk to me.
Sometimes I write about things that never happened to me that wind up happening to me. When you put things out in the universe, sometimes they wind up coming true.
Then she took my hand and touched it to the wound beside her eye. I caressed the half-inch scar. As I did so, the waves of her consciousness pulsed through my fingertips and into me - a delicate resonance of longing. Probably someone should take this girl in his arms and hold her tight, I thought. Probably someone other than me. Someone qualified to give her something. "Goodbye, Mr. Wind-Up Bird. See you again sometime.
Growing up, I was the odd bird. My interest in mathematics, my interest in the world, how I approach things from a scientific standpoint. You're always going to be looked at as a different bird.
I suppose we think euphemistically that all writers write because they have something to say that is truthful and honest and pointed and important. And I suppose I subscribe to that, too. But God knows when I look back over thirty years of professional writing, I'm hard-pressed to come up with anything that's important. Some things are literate, some things are interesting, some things are classy, but very damn little is important.
Beware of letting small faults pass unnoticed under the idea it is a little one. There are no little things in training children; all are important. Little weeds need plucking up as much as any. Leave them alone and they will soon be great.
There will always be ways to pay my rent, whether I wind up having to be a waitress on the side or whatever it is, but I think it's so important for me to do things that I'm passionate about.
MR.GOUDY: I believe you testified that you backed away from Aaron Wharton. MR.COGBURN: That is right. MR.GOUDY: You were backing away? MR.COGBURN: Yes sir. He had that ax raised. MR.GOUDY: Which direction were you going? MR.COGBURN: I always go backwards when I am backing up.
I don't know [why we're here]. People sometimes say to me, 'Why don't you admit that the humming bird, the butterfly, the Bird of Paradise are proof of the wonderful things produced by Creation?' And I always say, well, when you say that, you've also got to think of a little boy sitting on a river bank, like here, in West Africa, that's got a little worm, a living organism, in his eye and boring through the eyeball and is slowly turning him blind. The Creator God that you believe in, presumably, also made that little worm. Now I personally find that difficult to accommodate.
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