Tao Te Ching

The Power of Goodness, the Wisdom Beyond Words
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Sputnik Sweetheart

By Haruki Murakami

Murakami is such a master of finding and describing the sacred in the ordinary, the significance in the daily details of life, the meaningfulness in our confused wanderings of mind. "Sputnik" in the story is a mispronunciation of "Beatnik" and an analogy for the lonely emptiness of life, the individual isolation of existence like a cold lump of metal circulating around the planet far off in space. But as the satellite still has gravity as a connection to earth, characters in the story maintain a slim connection to sanity through relationship with each other. A deep sense of egolessness pervades, boundaries between self and other dissolve, the dream-like quality of life infuses reality.

Themes

Themes: Dream

Quotes from Sputnik Sweetheart

“A real story requires a kind of magical baptism to link the world on this side with the world on the other side.”

Chapters:

Themes: Pluralism Magic

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“Am I spending all my time and energy in some useless pursuit? Hauling a bucket of water to a place that's on the verge of flooding? Shouldn't I give up any useless effort and just go with the flow?”

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“Any explanation or logic that explains everything so easily has a hidden trap it it... if it's something a single book can explain, it's not worth having explained.”

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Themes: Golden Chains

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“But tomorrow I’ll be a different person, never again the person I was. Not that anyone will notice... on the outside nothing will be different.”

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Themes: Change True Self

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“Don’t pointless things have a place, too, in this far-from-perfect world? Remove everything pointless from an imperfect life and it’d lose even its imperfection.”

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“I felt as if I'd swallowed an overcast sky whole.”

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“I must be in love with this woman... I don't have any choice... Danger may be lurking there, I might end up losing everything but there's no turning back even if it means I'll be burned up and gone forever.”

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Themes: Perseverance Love

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“I reach a point where, in a realm I cannot even give a name to, I conceive a dream, a sightless fetus called understanding, floating in the universal, overwhelming amniotic fluid of incomprehension.”

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Themes: Creativity

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“In dreams you don't need to make any distinctions between things. Boundaries don't exist so there are hardly ever any collisions. Reality is different. Reality bites.”

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Themes: Reality

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“Irrepressible curiosity vied with an instinctive fear... The principle that made other choices possible was missing. Or was it the choice that made the principle possible that was missing?”

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“On the flip side of everything we think we absolutely have pegged lurks an equal amount of the unknown. Understanding is but the sum of our misunderstandings... Who can really distinguish between the sea and what's reflected in it? Or tell the difference between the falling rain and loneliness?”

Chapters:

Themes: Opinion

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“People have to come up with a clever strategy if they want what they know and what they don't know to live together in peace. And that strategy is thinking. We have to find a secure anchor. Otherwise, no mistake about it, we're on an awful collision course.”

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“she didn't try to hide her age but let it naturally rise to the surface, accepted it for what it was, and made peace with it.”

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Themes: Old Age

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“The answer is dreams. Dreaming on and on. Entering the world of dreams, and never coming out. Living in dreams for the rest of time”

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Themes: Dream

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“We’re both looking at the same moon, in the same world. We’re connected to reality by the same line. All I have to do is quietly draw it towards me.”

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“What's important is being attentive, being alert to things, not prejudging but listening to what's going on, keeping our ears, heart and mind open.”

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“What's really important is not the big things other people have thought up, but the small things you, yourself have.... Or maybe the smaller the notion, the harder it is to grasp?”

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