A Wild Sheep Chase Quotes
"Everytime we come here, I feel like we’re on a picnic."
"The time breezes by. That’s like a picnic, isn’t it?"
"The world kept moving on; I alone was at a standstill."
"Back then, there was this girl who’d sleep with anyone." That’s her name.
"Sometimes the whole idea turns me off. But you know, maybe I want to find out about a lot of different people. Or maybe that’s how my world comes together for me."
"Caught in the most curiously depressing circumstances."
"Suppose I meet up with old friends and mid-swing the conversation turns to her."
"Of course, strictly speaking, she didn’t sleep with just anyone. She had standards."
"Reminded me of a street washed clean after a downpour."
"Only the statement "I am drunk," plain and simple."
"I’m sitting on my ears, and you’ve got only half of you that’s really living."
"You sought me out. That’s the biggest reason."
"The long and short of it is, it’s up to you."
"Some things are forgotten, some things disappear, some things die."
"It’s been boring so far. It’ll probably be the same from here on."
"You wouldn’t have any idea, would you?"
"Didn’t we have a long-standing unspoken agreement never to touch upon each other’s private affairs?"
"For lo the shadows of a gaol untold, Do grow about our days now many fold."
"Exploitation doesn’t exist. It’s a fairy tale."
"Time keeps on flowing unchanged like a clear river too."
"Everything comes out backwards. I use exactly the wrong words."
"Time really is one big continuous cloth, no?"
"It’s like drinking beer on the shores of the Black Sea."
"A long, drawn-out dead-end street—probably just what she meant."
"Boarding a long-distance train without any luggage gave me a feeling of exhilaration."
"What’s over for one person isn’t over for another."
"From that point on there was no hometown for me. Nowhere to return to. What a relief! No one to want me, no one to want anything from me."
"No matter how much speed we put on, there was no escaping boredom."
"Nothing I can do about it, got to let it go."
"If the only good Indian is a dead Indian, it was my fate to go on living."
"The song is over. But the melody lingers on."
"Everything brimming with a languid nostalgia."
"Once I did, I wouldn’t be able to go anywhere."
"The whole of Japan, leveled of mountains, coastlines or lakes, sprawling with uniform rows of public housing. Would that be the right thing?"
"The Will cannot be shared. It is either passed on in toto, or lost in toto."
"Existence ceases for the individuum as we know it, and all becomes chaos."
"The expansion of consciousness your generation underwent at the end of the sixties ended in complete and utter failure."
"But just consider, this may be the sum total of all that is left to us."
"I live my life trying my best to avoid things ever coming to that. Which ultimately only creates more problems."
"We are on top of most things, except the whereabouts of one sheep."
"Everybody has some one thing they do not want to lose."
"Humans by necessity must have a midway point between their desires and their pride."
"I’m well on the way to veteran class when it comes to killing time in the city."
"The slight breeze coming in through the window wafted my cigarette smoke off somewhere."
"Because they’re not interchangeable, I suppose. For instance, there’s only one Shinjuku Station and you can’t just replace it with Shibuya Station. This non-interchangeability is to say that they’re not mass-produced."
"If Shinjuku Station were in Ekoda, it would be Ekoda Station."
"So what we’re talking about here is not the name of a physical object, but the name of a function. A role. Isn’t that purpose?"
"They are all given names in compensation for their fixity on the earth."
"You said planes save you over ten hours. So where does all that time go?"
"I just don’t like names. Basically, I can’t see what’s wrong with calling me ‘me’ or you ‘you’ or us ‘us’ or them ‘them.’"
"I do like the word ‘we,’ though. It has an Ice Age ring to it."
"Neither you nor I have left so much behind, really."
"By all means, I would like to meet your father."
"Everything went black at the time. But life’s a fickle thing."
"Sheep hurt my father, and through my father, sheep have also hurt me."
"The basic stupidity of modern Japan is that we’ve learned absolutely nothing from our contact with other Asian peoples."
"The sheep goes away leaving only an idea. But without the sheep there is no expelling that idea. That is what it is to be ‘sheepless.’"
"Somehow the sheep has an uncanny sense of the most competent targets."
"People have their limits, and the sheep has no use for people who’ve reached their limit."
"The values of one lone individual cannot bear up before the presence of that sheep."
"Ever since the sheep departed, I can’t tell how much is really me and how much the shadow of the sheep."
"The roads are blocked in the winter... It’s nice and quiet there."
"All these layers do absolutely nothing for my line of work."
"The bottom’s fallen out of agriculture. The population’s gone way down too."
"It’s a curious thing, a town dying. A person dying I can understand. But a whole town dying…"
"The truth is we are dying. We’ll hold on as long as we have the railway, but if that goes we’ll be dead for sure."
"But when it comes to actually packing up and leaving, I can’t bring myself to do it."
"The sheep trust the dog. He ain’t no sheepdog if the sheep don’t trust him."
"I always remember important details long afterward."
"All the works of man faded into nothingness, yet still the sheep remained."
"Time regressed like a film running backward."
"Loneliness wasn’t such a bad feeling. It was like the stillness of the pin oak after the little birds had flown off."
"Everything from the core of my being to the tips of my fingers was numb."
"Society could go on perfectly well without me."
"Nothing but snow all around, everything frozen up."
"The morning air of the pasture turned steadily cooler."
"Each time I felt like smoking, I thought about her and her ears. Compared to everything I’d lost this far, losing smoking was trivial."
"It was as if the pasture were the winds’ own private thoroughfare."
"The snow was blinding. I drew the curtain and curled up to read by the heater."
"Only silence which rolled like oil into every corner."
"I was all alone. Probably more alone than I’d been in all my life."
"In the end, though, nobody ever materialized. Only the winds blowing across the pasture."
"Something gnawed at me. Something that had passed before my eyes but which I’d been too dense to notice."
"The sort of silence that follows in the wake of the death of all living things."
"The snow that had collected on the roof’s gables came sliding down in would-be icebergs that broke up on the ground with an unnerving thud."
"I learned to distance myself from 'memory.' Until that day in the uncertain future when a distant voice calls from out of the lacquer blackness."