Haruki Murakami

That__ my dream. It__ always the same. Always. Every little detail. And every time I have it, it__ just as scary as the last.(_)It__ so real, I feel as if I__e already died hundreds of times.

This life is nothing but a short, painful dream.

She tried to think about what lay ahead, but soon gave up. 'Words turn into stone,' Nimit had told her. She settled deep into her seat and closed her eyes. All at once the image came to her of the sky she had seen while swimming on her back. And Erroll Garner's 'I'll Remember April.' Let me sleep, she thought. Just let me sleep. And wait for the dream to come.

Unsure how to answer, I took another grape. Time was no problem for me, but I wasn't eager to hear the long life story of a dwarf. And besides, this was a dream. It could evaporate any moment.

For a ten-year-old boy and a ten-year-old girl to become good friends was not easy under any circumstances. Indeed, it might be one of the most difficult accomplishments in the world.

And you came to Finland to build a station?""No I came here on vacation to visit a friend.""That's good," the driver said. "Vacations and friends are the two best things in life.

Ordinary imperfect people, always choose similarly imperfect people as friends.

You__e afraid of imagination. And even more afraid of dreams. Afraid of the responsibility that begins in dreams. But you have to sleep, and dreams are a part of sleep. When you__e awake you can suppress imagination. But you can__ suppress dreams.

Sometimes when I look at you, I feel I'm gazing at a distant star. It's dazzling, but the light is from tens of thousands of years ago.Maybe the star doesn't even exist any more. Yet sometimes that light seems more real to me than anything.

The ones with no imagination are always the quickest to justify themselves

You're afraid of imagination. And even more afraid of dreams. Afraid of the responsibility that begins in dreams. But you have to sleep, and dreams are a part of sleep. When you're awake you can suppress imagination. But you can't suppress dreams.

Still, though, I can't be sure if the zoo as I recall it was really like that. How can I put it? I sometimes feel that it's too vivid, if you know what I mean. And when I start having thoughts like this, the more I think about it, the less I can tell how much of the vividness is real and how much of it my imagination has invented. I feel as if I've wandered into a labyrinth. Has that ever happened to you?

I just gave them a little scare. A touch of psychological terror. As Joseph Conrad once wrote, true terror is the kind that men feel towards their imagination. (from Super-frog Saves Tokyo)

The whole terrible fight occured in the area of imagination. That is the precise location of our battlefield. It is there, that we experience our victories and defeats.

Since I'm a novelist I'm the opposite of you - I believe that what's most important is what cannot be measured. I'm not denying your way of thinking, but the greater part of people's lives consist of things that are unmeasurable, and trying to change all these to something measurable is realistically impossible.

It might be a little silly for someone getting to be my age to put this into words, but I just want to make sure I get the facts down clearly : I'm the kind of person who likes to be by himself. To put a finer point on it, I'm the type of person who doesn't find it painful to be alone. I find spending an hour or two everyday running alone, not speaking to anyone as well as four of five hours at my desk, to be neither difficult or boring.

He stopped complaining, but now I was annoyed. I went to the roof and drank alone.

I'd like to have a good long talk with you once you've calmed down. Please call me soon. Happy Birthday.