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People were infected with the concept that happiness was something outside themselves, and a new and powerful form of loneliness was born. Mix loneliness with stress and enervation, and all sorts of madness can occur. Anxiety increases, and in order to obliterate the anxiety, people turn to extreme sex, violence, and even murder.

— Ryu Murakami Audition (1997)

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More quotes by Ryu Murakami

Buying and selling is the basis of all social intercourse, and the commodity an actor or model offered for sale was nothing less than her own being.

Audition (1997)

In Japan, even when you’re alone, you’re never really that lonely. But the loneliness you feel among people with differently colored skin and eyes, whose language you don’t even speak very well – that sort of loneliness is something you feel down to the marrow of your bones.

Audition (1997)

"Advertising departments, as you know, are crawling with people whose frontal lobes are so under developed that if you flatter them a bit they'll swear shit is platinum!"

Audition (1997)

Parents, teachers, government - they all teach you how to live the dreary , deadening life of a slave, but nobody teaches you how to live normally.

In the Miso Soup (1997)

Every one of a hundred thousand cities around the world had its own special sunset and it was worth going there, just once, if only to see the sun go down.

Coin Locker Babies (1980)

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Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Ryu Murakami (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.