There are various reasons why an individual might habitually consume large quantities of alcohol, but they all effectively boil down to the same thing.

“The other half is still untapped somewhere.” “That’s because you’re only half-living.” she said briskly.

“What’s more, you’re loads better than you think you are.” “So why is it I get to thinking that way?” I puzzled.

Whenever I tired of strolling through the chill aisles of the aquarium, I'd steal off to my place on the bench of the high-ceilinged stillness of the exhibition room and spend hours on end there contemplating this whale's penis.

So it was that my most impressionable years of boyhood were spent gazing at not a whale, but a whale's penis.

Chapter 4: The Whale's Penis and the Woman with Three Occupations.

We are not whales- and this constitutes one great theme underscoring our sex lives. Our human sex life- how shall I put it?- differs fundamentally from the sex life of a whale. There's sex for self-improvement start to finish and there's sex for killing time straight through sex that is therapeutic at first only to end up as nothing-better-to-do, and vice versa. Which only goes to say that there's sex as therapy (self-therapy, that is) and there's sex as pastime.

To sleep with a woman: it can seem of the utmost importance in your mind, or then again it can seem like nothing much at all.

Someone like you can always be counted on to turn the thing over.' Say there's an hourglass: the sand's about to run out.

'I don't know, there's something about you.

The sunlight, the smell of the grass, the faintest patter of rain, everything got on my nerves. In the autumn, everything took on a desolate cast, the colors swiftly fading before my eyes. The world kept moving on I alone was at a standstill. For months I'd been stuck, unable to take one step in any new direction. Caught in the most curiously depressing circumstances. No prospect of graduating soon, and yet no reason to quit school.

I was twenty-one at the time, about to turn twenty-two.

There are various reasons why an individual might habitually consume large quantities of alcohol, but they all effectively boil down to the same thing. Quotes I was twenty-one at the time, about to turn twenty-two.

A Wild Sheep Chase: A Novel ( 羊をめぐる冒険, 1982) is a novel by Japanese writer Haruki Murakami.

A Wild Sheep Chase by Haruki Murakami