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1) "Janáček composed his little symphony in 1926. He originally wrote the opening as a fanfare for a gymnastics festival. Aomame imagined 1926 Czechoslovakia: The First World War had ended, and the country was freed from the long rule of the Hapsburg Dynasty. As they enjoyed the peaceful respite visiting central Europe, people drank Pilsner beer in cafés and manufactured handsome light machine guns. Two years earlier, in utter obscurity, Franz Kafka had left the world behind. Soon Hitler would come out of nowhere and gobble up this beautiful little country in the blink of an eye, but at the time no one knew what hardships lay in store for them. This may be the most important proposition revealed by history: 'At the time, no one knew what was coming.'"

2) "I'm here, but I'm not here. I'm in two places at once. It goes against Einstein's theorem, but what the hell. Call it the Zen of the killer."

3) "'Hmm. Real life is different from math. Things in life don't necessarily flow over the shortest possible route. For me, math is—how should I put it?—math is all too natural. It's like beautiful scenery. It's just there. There's no need to exchange it with anything else. That's why, when I'm doing math, I sometimes feel I'm turning transparent. And that can be scary.' Fuka-Eri kept looking straight into Tengo's eyes as if she were looking into an empty house with her face pressed up against the glass. Tengo said, 'When I'm writing a story, I use words to transform the surrounding scene into something more natural for me. In other words, I reconstruct it. That way, I can confirm without a doubt that this person known as 'me' exists in the world. This is a totally different process from steeping myself in the world of math.' 'You confirm that you exist,' Fuka-Eri said. 'I can't say I've been one hundred percent successful at it,' Tengo said."

4) "'I am not a professional, or a pervert, just an ordinary citizen. An ordinary citizen who wants nothing more than to have intercourse with a member of the opposite sex. There's nothing special about me. I'm totally normal.'"

5) "'Do you give them names?' Aomame asked, curious. 'Like dogs or cats?' The dowager gave her head a little shake. 'No, I don't give them names, but I can tell one from another by their shapes and patterns. And besides, there wouldn't be much point in giving them names: they die so quickly. These people are your nameless friends for just a little while. I come here every day, say hello to the butterflies, and talk about things with them. When the time comes, though, they just quietly go off and disappear. I'm sure it means they've died, but I can never find their bodies. They don't leave any trace behind. It's as if they've been absorbed by the air. They're dainty little creatures that hardly exist at all: they come out of nowhere, search quietly for a few, limited things, and disappear into nothingness again, perhaps to some other world.'"

6) "Of course, it's all just a hypothesis, Aomame told herself as she walked. But it's the most compelling hypothesis I can produce at the moment. I'll have to act according to this one, I suppose, until a more compelling hypothesis comes along. Otherwise, I could end up being thrown to the ground somewhere. If only for that reason, I'd better give an appropriate name to this new situation in which I find myself. There's a need, too, for a special name in order to distinguish between this present world and the former world in which the police carried old-fashioned revolvers. Even cats and dogs need names. A newly changed world must need one, too. 1Q84—that's what I'll call this new world, Aomame decided. Q is for 'question mark.' A world that bears a question."

7) "Some time had to pass before she was able to grasp what the difference was. And even after she had grasped it, she had to work hard to accept it. What her vision had seized upon, her mind could not easily confirm. There were two moons in the sky—a small moon and a large one. They were floating there side by side. The large one was the usual moon that she had always seen. It was nearly full, and yellow. But there was another moon right next to it. It had an unfamiliar shape. It was somewhat lopsided, and greenish, as though thinly covered with moss."

8) "With his penis still resting on the palm of her hand, Tengo began to speak. 'The story is about me—or about somebody modeled on me.' 'I'm sure it is,' she said. 'Am I in it?' 'No, you're not. I'm in a world that isn't here.' 'So I'm not in the world that isn't here.' 'And not just you. The people who are in this world are not in the world that isn't here.' 'How is the world that isn't here different from this world? Can you tell which world you're in now?' 'Of course I can. I'm the one who's writing it.' 'What I mean is, for people other than you. Say, if I just happened to wander into that world now, could I tell?' 'I think you could,' Tengo said. 'For example, in the world that isn't here, there are two moons. So you can tell the difference.'"

9) "'They have been called by many different names, but in most cases have not been called anything at all. They were simply there. The expression 'Little People' is just an expedient. My daughter called them that when she was very young and brought them with her.' 'Then you became a king.' The man drew a strong breath in through his nose and held it in his lungs for a time before releasing it slowly. 'I am no king. I became one who listens to the voices.' 'And now you are seeking to be slaughtered.' 'No, it need not be a slaughter. This is 1984, and we are in the middle of the big city. There is no need for a brutal, bloody killing. All you have to do is take my life. It can be neat and simple.'"

10) "Outside the window, the thunder-without-lightning rumbled with increased force. Raindrops pelted the glass. The two of them were in an ancient cave—a dark, damp, low-ceilinged cave. Dark beasts and spirits surrounded the entrance. For the briefest instant around her, light and shadow became one. A nameless gust of wind blew through the distant channel. That was the signal. Aomame brought her fist down in one short, precise movement. Everything ended in silence. The beasts and spirits heaved a deep breath, broke up their encirclement, and returned to the depths of a forest that had lost its heart."

11) "Ushikawa left his camera, leaned back against the wall, and looked up at the stained ceiling. Soon everything struck him as empty. He had never felt so utterly alone, never felt the dark to be this intense. He remembered his house back in Chuorinkan, his lawn and his dog, his wife and two daughters, the sunlight shining there. And he thought of the DNA he had given to his daughters, the DNA for a misshapen head and a twisted soul."

12) "His father's passing didn't particularly shock Tengo. He had spent two solid weeks beside his unconscious father. He already felt that his father had accepted his impending death. The doctors weren't able to determine what had put him into a coma, but Tengo knew. His father had simply decided to die, or else had abandoned the will to live any longer. To borrow Kumi's phrase, as a 'single leaf on a tree,' he turned off the light of consciousness, closed the door on any senses, and waited for the change of seasons."

13) "Aomame mourned the deaths of these two friends deeply. It saddened her to think that these women were forever gone from the world. And she mourned their lovely breasts—breasts that had vanished without a trace."

1) "[These] situations remain fantasies, in which social antagonism is given the shape of alien overlords, supernatural beings, professional assassins or shady politicians and businessmen, rather than institutional inefficiencies or internal systemic contradictions. Even in the more 'real-world' cases, where the adversaries are corrupt elites, the games do not connect their characters' dissatisfactions to hierarchies of power constituted by neoliberal political and economic conditions. Of course, these games never claim to be solving the world's problems, and have no overt pretensions to spark alternative political ideals, but the issue is that, because the deeper social issues they hint at are allegorized rather than consciously formulated, when they reach their endings and the fantasy antagonism is vanquished, they are never quite satisfactory. The characters may be happier than when the antagonism arose, but the 'background' remains largely untouched, so the improved situation appears doomed to expire."

2) "In 'open-world' games, especially, where players are allowed to roam large, non-linear environments and encouraged to 'do anything,' the array of possibilities obscures the underlying rigidity in the system of rules itself, and that all the choices available fulfil individualistic (and violent) desires. In fact, it can be said that videogames structurally embody the neoliberal concept that 'there is no alternative.' In the game, the lack of alternative is literal; we cannot act in ways not coded into it, and must either accept its systems or stop playing completely."

3) "[There] is also a certain logic that connects these disparate injunctions: a kind of instrumentalism that converts all aspects of life into calculable values, and speaks to the individual as a consumer who can define his/her own life through hundreds of micro choices. In a sense, everything from politics to personal relationships is subject to this logic, as each decision apparently counts towards an individualized and commodified ideal of success and satisfaction. As such, it is not that there is no systemic logic, but that the logic itself creates a sense of both freedom and chaos, with a singular demand for individual fulfilment that is full of contradiction in practice. The contradiction occurs because the pressure of success is limitless and covers every area of life, so it seems that we can never do enough, or that some of our efforts actually counteract others. Crucially, in my view, it is a mistake to view these varied demands as a matter of achieving 'work-life balance,' because encoded into the neoliberal ideal of success is a hidden clause that nothing is ever enough; we can always earn more, have more fun, own a bigger house, be more attractive and so on."

4) "According to the brand of hedonism promoted in the [Saints Row III], these options make sense simply because more money equals more opportunity for pleasure, even though it reduces the women to commodities. In SRIII, the female body is an object of enjoyment that is also exploitable for profit, and is thus forced to labour for the hedonist's pleasure. Subsequently, despite never explicitly recognizing this particular tension, SRIV seems unable to stomach it anymore, and no longer seems fully satisfied with hedonism for its own sake. Thus, in a single destructive act it severs fun and freedom from their connection to money and (other people's) labour. In its utopian power fantasy, consumerist, hedonistic pleasure retains a central meaning and purpose, but without the exploitation. However, the only way it can realize this ideal is by exiting reality itself."

5) "So it seems that a select group of humans can now go on to start a new world. But have we not then come full circle, as the aliens become the source of exploitable labour that will serve the desires of the human elite in presumably building and maintaining a more permanent hedonistic utopia? Again, the social order will rest on hierarchical division, where free expression is for the few, maintained by the enslavement of the many. Because the antagonism has not been resolved it returns, and the Saints remain oblivious to it. On one hand, then, the utopian playground city couldn't sustain the presence of the Saints' chaotic ultra-freedom, which tears down the state and with it the whole platform that facilitates their behaviour. It seems that, although consumerist enjoyment always falls short when combined with responsibility, because we can never dedicate ourselves enough to it, without that tempering responsibility the unfettered pursuit of consumerist fulfilment becomes an explosion of libidinal aggression that destroys its own foundations. [...] The irony is that the very thing individualistic hedonism rails against–a network of social institutions that controls and oppresses the majority–is precisely what keeps it alive."

6) "Despite their cynicism, then, and even the criminal nature of their activities, the characters in GTAV are in a sense the perfect capitalist subjects. They find their satisfaction in the power fantasy of entrepreneurial capital accumulation, even as they distance themselves from it, and will do anything to achieve success. The ethics of what they do is hardly important, since everyone in the world of GTAV is corrupt; all that matters is their ability to balance work and enjoyment, which they manage admirably."

7) "The main theme of NMH instead resides in how it reproduces and reflects on the real-world dynamics of playing the game within its own fiction. In particular, its main character's escape into a surreal, violent criminal underworld, which endows him with a clear life goal, mirrors the way we, as players, play the game to escape our commodified reality. That is, its power fantasy is one of evading dominant expectations and forging a path outside social norms, but it is complicated by the lack of a place to go that exists outside the capitalist totality."

8) "Even in strictly economic terms, if the escape is all we live for it still must be funded through labour; the only way to get more escape time is to return to the prison and earn it."

9) "It is only when the Metaverse and the Personas eventually disappear that this impossible demand retreats, at least temporarily. In the game's end sequence, the main character is due to return to his home town, but his friends decide to take him on a farewell road trip, which at last frees them from the restrictions of the city and the calendar. But what is this freedom but one final retreat into irresponsible youth, before they must all return home to become adults and resume the normal routine? P5 frames imprisonment as apathy, resignation, acceptance, yet its characters and players must compliantly submit to its routines in order to advance."

10) "Of course, none of these questions are explicitly articulated in the games I have explored, due to the ideological confines in which they operate. They merely come across in hints of contradiction or dissatisfaction, and often in fact in the games' failure to convincingly resolve the antagonisms they represent. It is their sense of incompleteness, rather than any political ideal, that functions as a demand for a deeper social critique and more convincing answers. In essence, the power of these cultural objects is in what they can't quite say, or what the representation of the city as a playground, battleground, wasteland or prison, and the conflict that creates, stand in for. Clearly these cities are not 'realistic,' but it is because of this we can ask why they are unrealistic in the particular way they are, and receive interesting and potentially significant answers."

1) "What I saw that morning persuaded me that the scrivener was the victim of innate and incurable disorder. I might give alms to his body; but his body did not pain him; it was his soul that suffered, and his soul I could not reach."

2) "My eye ranged over the capacious rolling country, and over the mountains, and over the village, and over a farmhouse here and there, and over woods, groves, streams, rocks, fells—and I thought to myself, what a slight mark, after all, does man make on this huge great earth. Yet the earth makes a mark on him."

3) "Now, as I said before, having long previously sawed my wood, this Merrymusk came for his pay. 'My friend,' said I, 'do you know of any gentleman hereabouts who owns an extraordinary cock?' The twinkle glittered quite plain in the wood-sawyer's eye. 'I know of no gentleman,' he replied, 'who has what might well be called an extraordinary cock.'"

4) "With half a mile of sea between, how could her two enchanted arms aid those four fated ones? The distance long, the time one sand. After the lightning is beheld, what fool shall stay the thunderbolt?"

5) "The beings round me roared with famine. For in this mighty London misery but maddens. In the country it softens."

6) "It lies not far from Temple-Bar. Going to it, by the usual way, is like stealing from the heated plain into some cool, deep glen, shady among the harboring hills. Sick with the din and soiled with the mud of Fleet Street—where the Benedick tradesmen are hurrying by, with ledger-lines ruled along their brows; thinking upon rise of bread and fall of babies—you adroitly turn a mystic corner—not a street—glide down a dim, monastic way, flanked by dark, sedate, and solemn piles, and still wending on, give the whole careworn world the slip, and, disentangled, stand beneath the quiet cloisters of the Paradise of Bachelors."

7) "Immediately I found myself standing in a spacious place, intolerably lighted by long rows of windows, focusing inward the snowy scene without. At rows of blank-looking counters sat rows of blank-looking girls, white folders in their blank hands, all blankly folding blank paper."

8) "In the south of Europe, nigh a once frescoed capital, now with dank mould cankering its bloom, central in a plain, stands what, at distance, seems the black mossed stump of some immeasurable pine, fallen, in forgotten days, with Anak and the Titan. As all along where the pine tree falls, its dissolution leaves a mossy mound—last-flung shadow of the perished trunk; never lengthening, never lessening; unsubject to the fleet falsities of the sun; shade immutable, and true gauge which cometh by prostration—so westward from what seems the stump, one steadfast spear of lichened ruin veins the plain. From that treetop, what birded chimes of silver throats had rung. A stone pine; a metallic aviary in its crown: the Bell-Tower, built by the great mechanician, the unblest foundling, Bannadonna."

9) "A time ago, no matter how long precisely, I, an old man, removed from the country to the city, having become unexpected heir to a great old house in a narrow street of one of the lower wards, once the haunt of style and fashion, full of gay parlors and bridal chambers, but now, for the most part, transformed into counting-rooms and warehouses. There bales and boxes usurp the place of sofas; daybooks and ledgers are spread where once the delicious breakfast toast was buttered. In those old wards the glorious old soft-warfle days are over."

10) "It was nearly midnight, and all were in bed but ourselves, who sat up, one in each chimney-corner; she, needles in hand, indefatigably knitting a sock; I, pipe in mouth, indolently weaving my vapors."

11) "'Yours are strange fancies, Marianna.' 'They but reflect the things.' 'Then I should have said, 'These are strange things,' rather than, 'Yours are strange fancies.'' 'As you will;' and took up her sewing."

12) "At length, when pretty well again, and sitting out, in the September morning, upon the piazza, and thinking to myself, when, just after a little flock of sheep, the farmer's banded children passed, a-nutting, and said, 'How sweet a day'—it was, after all, but what their fathers call a weather-breeder—and, indeed, was become so sensitive through my illness, as that I could not bear to look upon a Chinese creeper of my adoption, and which, to my delight, climbing a post of the piazza, had burst out in starry bloom, but now, if you removed the leaves a little, showed millions of strange, cankerous worms, which, feeding upon those blossoms, so shared their blessed hue, as to make it unblessed evermore—worms, whose germs had doubtless lurked in the very bulb which, so hopefully, I had planted: in this ingrate peevishness of my weary convalescence, was I sitting there; when, suddenly looking off, I saw the golden mountain-window, dazzling like a deep-sea dolphin."

I probably agree with this person, but the prose is frustrating, meandering, aimless gibberish.

"But this is how mushrooms experience the world"? Yeah, well I'm not a fucking mushroom, am I?

God.

1) "What do you do when your world starts to fall apart? I go for a walk, and if I'm really lucky, I find mushrooms. Mushrooms pull me back into my senses, not just—like flowers—through their riotous colors and smells but because they pop up unexpectedly, reminding me of the good fortune of just happening to be there. Then I know that there are still pleasures amidst the terrors of indeterminacy."

2) "Matsutake are wild mushrooms that live in human-disturbed forests. Like rats, raccoons, and cockroaches, they are willing to put up with some of the environmental messes humans have made. Yet they are not pests; they are valuable gourmet treats—at least in Japan, where high prices sometimes make matsutake the most valuable mushroom on earth. Through their ability to nurture trees, matsutake help forests grow in daunting places. To follow matsutake guides us to possibilities of coexistence within environmental disturbance. This is not an excuse for further damage. Still, matsutake show one kind of collaborative survival."

3) "For living things, species identities are a place to begin, but they are not enough: ways of being are emergent effects of encounters."

4) "[Contaminated] diversity is recalcitrant to the kind of 'summing up' that has become the hallmark of modern knowledge. Contaminated diversity is not only particular and historical, ever changing, but also relational. It has no self-contained units; its units are encounter-based collaborations. Without self-contained units, it is impossible to compute costs and benefits, or functionality, to any 'one' involved. No self-contained individuals or groups assure their self-interests oblivious to the encounter. Without algorithms based on self-containment, scholars and policymakers might have to learn something about the cultural and natural histories at stake. That takes time, and too much time, perhaps, for those who dream of grasping the whole in an equation. But who put them in charge?"

5) "Freedom/haunting: two sides of the same experience. Conjuring a future full of pasts, a ghost-ridden freedom is both a way to move on and a way to remember. In its fever, picking escapes the separation of persons and things so dear to industrial production. The mushrooms are not yet alienated commodities; they are effects of the pickers' freedom. Yet this scene only exists because the two-sided experience has purchase in a strange sort of commerce. Buyers translate freedom trophies into trade through dramatic performances of 'free market competition.' Thus market freedom enters freedom's jumble, making the holding in abeyance of concentrated power, labor, property, and alienation seem strong and effective."

6) "Can matsutake as an economic product be managed sustainably? This question takes shape within the history of Forest Service efforts at timber management. In this history, nontimber forest products cannot be seen unless they make themselves compatible with timber. Thus the stand—the unit of manageable timber—is the basic landscape unit U.S. foresters can see. The fungal patch ecologies studied by Japanese scientists just do not register on this grid. The scale of U.S. forestry research on matsutake is adjusted accordingly. Some studies use random transects to sample matsutake on a scale that is compatible with timber stands. Others build models through which fungal patches can be scaled up. These studies devise monitoring techniques to make matsutake visible on the scale of timber's rationalization."

7) "To find a good mushroom, I need all my senses. For there is a secret to matsutake mushroom picking: one rarely looks for mushrooms."

8) "Sometimes common entanglements emerge not from human plans but despite them. It is not even the undoing of plans, but rather the unaccounted for in their doing that offers possibilities for elusive moments of living in common. This is the case for the making of private assets. Assembling assets, we ignore the common—even when it pervades the assembly. Yet the unnoticed, too, can be a site for potential allies."

9) "Bosses are embodiments of the entrepreneurial spirit. In contrast to earlier socialist dreams, they are supposed to make themselves, not their communities, wealthy. They dream of themselves as self-made men. Yet their autonomous selves bear comparison to matsutake mushrooms: the visible fruit of unrecognized, elusive, and ephemeral commons."

1) "Something moved me once. That's how all these stories begin for me. Some historical something, some fact or anecdote, came into my day—usually unannounced, over the radio, at a museum, in a text from a friend, on one of the seven hundred tabs open on my browser, or embedded in some larger work—and changed it. Somehow managed to cut through the whirr and sputter of life and moved me. Often I don't know why. That fascinates me."

2) "But scientists here on Earth couldn't signal back [to Mars]. They tried to think of a way. Global semaphore, someone proposed, would require flags the size of the state of Indiana and a flagpole that defied the laws of physics, not to mention handling procedures that would outstrip the capacity of even the most industrious Boy Scout troop. Contacting the Martians would take something else, another scientist suggested, something like draining Lake Superior, then filling it with gasoline and setting it on fire. The light could be seen from the surface of Mars, assuming folks there had a telescope at least as strong as Lowell's. But would they know it was a signal? Or would they just think we liked to set lakes on fire now and then?"

3) "There was the night she went dancing—she was twenty, and boys wanted to dance with her then, especially when she wore her red velvet dress—and one young man, tall and handsome, came up to talk to her. He told her how he wanted to be a scientist, a naturalist, and to study animals in Africa, and she asked him if he wanted to get out of there. They went down to the beach and the pier, where people like them didn't go, where there were honky-tonks and hot dog stands and the place where they spun sugar into cotton candy, and they wound up at this joint where they played jazz. They had never heard jazz before, but they soon found their rhythm, and they danced until the sun came up. Frances thanked the bandleader on her way out, saying that it had been the best night of her life. Three nights later, three nights after seeing her in her red velvet dress, Frederick Hamerstrom asked Frances to marry him. She asked what had taken him so long."

4) "To this day, historians debate whether Thomas Faunce's memory, at ninety-five, was accurate. And whether that specific rock—or any rock, for that matter—played any particular role in the Pilgrims' arrival. But it is clear that it didn't hold any real significance, practical or sentimental, to the Pilgrims themselves, because they basically wrote everything down, and no one ever mentioned it. Instead, the thing that makes this rock "Plymouth Rock" is poetry. There is something moving about this ninety-five-year-old man being moved. There's something romantic about the idea that this, right here, on this spot, this is where it all began. That is where it all began for the idea of Plymouth Rock, at least—when they built the wharf in a different spot and started to protect this rock and turn it into a relic, a symbol of freedom, a tie to a glorious past, an object worthy of veneration, and apparently of being dug up by a bunch of dudes gathered at the waterside to stick it to England."

5) "The cable didn't say how her husband had died. Neither did his obituary. A big one, in The New York Times, befitting the scion of a wealthy family, long familiar to the readers of the paper's society pages. William Hunter Harkness was a handsome Harvard man turned explorer, which was a type of guy in the early 1930s."

6) "It was 1839. He was sixty-four. During all the years he'd spent dragging Versailles around, trying to convince America that he was its greatest painter, he'd barely painted. He was rusty. And he knew it. So he went back to France, thinking that being there would inspire him, would help get him back to where he'd been before, to when he was young and everything felt so full of promise. He found that Versailles hadn't changed. The same mist from the same fountains in the same breeze, the same long shadows as the day grew late. But he had changed. As one does. He was heartbroken, he wrote, to be reminded of who he'd been those years before. A young American, standing in this garden, imagining painting this garden and all that painting this garden was going to bring."

7) "I like the new picture more. My grandparents as just two people figuring it out. It isn't the cover photo for some classic love story. It isn't love itself, but it may be life itself: one of those in-between moments you don't remember later. The in-between feelings you can't quite put a name to. The space between the story of our lives and those lives as we live them. I love that space and the magic that seems to exist in a place between and beyond concrete facts and the well-worn language of familiar stories. I love the spark that is kindled there, to flare just long enough to help us remember that life, in the present as in the past, is more complicated and more interesting and more beautiful and more improbable and more alive than we'd realized the moment before. That notion animates every story I try to write. I want to conjure the magic that lies in the liminal spaces between the plot points in people's lives."

8) "But here was Marconi near the end of his life, growing weaker and weaker with each heart attack. Dreaming of a device that would let him hear these lost sounds, that would let him tap in to these eternal frequencies. He would tell people that if he got it right, he would be able to hear Jesus of Nazareth giving the Sermon on the Mount. He would be able to hear everything that had ever been said. Everything he himself ever said. At the end of his life, he could sit in his piazza in Rome and hear everything that was ever said to him or about him. He could relive every toast and testimonial. We all could. Hear everything. Hear Marco Polo talk to Genghis Khan. Hear Shakespeare give an actor a line reading. Hear my grandmother introduce herself to my grandfather at a nightclub in Rhode Island. Hear someone tell you they love you, the first time they told you they loved you. Hear everything, forever."