1Q84

Highlights

Smart presidents usually became the targets of assassins, so people with higher-than-average intelligence probably did their best to avoid being elected.

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Time itself was uniform in composition, but once consumed, it took on a deformed shape. One period of time might be terribly heavy and long, while another could be light and short. Occasionally the order of things could be reversed, and in the worst cases order itself could vanish entirely.

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You can’t choose how you’re born, but you can choose how you die.

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A person learns how to love himself through the simple acts of loving and being loved by someone else. Do you understand what I am saying? A person who is incapable of loving another cannot properly love himself.

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Nobody’s easier to fool, Ushikawa thought, than the person who is convinced that he is right.

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So he always kept his mouth shut. He kept his ears open and listened closely to whatever anyone else had to say, aiming to learn something from everything he heard. This habit eventually became a useful tool. Through this, he discovered a number of important realities, including this one: most people in the world don’t really use their brains to think. And people who don’t think are the ones who don’t listen to others.

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