The Cabinet

That is to say, cats have no masters. They only recognize friends and subordinates.

Like all canned food, love has an expiration date, a price tag, and a warning label. In order to love, you need to check the price tag to see if you have enough money in your wallet, observe the warnings given in fine print, and finish matters before the expiration date. Only then is it a smooth process for everyone.

But when you think about it there’s no time in our lives we haven’t been able to endure. If there was such a time, we wouldn’t have made it this far.

Home is such a funny word. We make the decission to live somewhere and then it's called 'home'. We eat there, work there, get married there, buy a house there. [..] I've been on a long journey. I don't think 'home' is that important. To really know yourself, you sometimes have to become nomad and forget about home.

There is no moral to the story. We always look for the moral of a story or some nice adage, but morals and adages never changed anyone’s life. That there is no moral of the story – that’s the moral of the story.

Death is when the balance in your bank account of time reaches zero. You’ve either used up all your time, or someone has taken it from you. That’s all it is. You simply have no money to revive your bankrupt life.

You mean to say, all I need to do is sleep when it’s dark out…?

Conversely, primitive humans were much more spiritual beings. They worked when the sun was out, and they dreamed and rested once it set. In other words, in order to live properly, you have to follow divine providence and live half your life working, and the other half dreaming.

But we can’t accept that people can have different lifestyles than our own. We can’t understand that they created that order, despite its apparent absurdity and foolishness, because it was the only way they could make it in this world.

What does that even mean? Is it that the capitalist system, which humans invented two hundred years ago, is now growing into an uncontrollable beast that will devour human society? I'm not sure if anyone knows.

A future society in which humans and objects resemble each other - what does that mean? Does it mean that in the twenty-second century, tables, vases, and wine glasses will love, cry, and feel loneliness like humans? Or does it mean that in the twenty-second century, people will live empty lives like vases and tables, unable to feel love, pain or loneliness?

People who see their own grave are rare. But I think that, before people build their houses, they should first make their graves. That’s because people who have seen their grave know how to cherish life.

Cooking, is it not itself a form of magic? It’s a feast of fire, ingredients, potions, and spells. If it weren’t magic, could it taste this good?

As long as you don’t ask yourself why you keep doing something, you can keep doing it until the day you die.

If you want to experience torpor you have to be willing to do one of two things: you either have to be fine with everything going to hell, or you have to have a devil-may-care attitude and be bold enough to act completely irresponsibly. You’ll never be able to achieve torpor worrying about every little thing that comes your way.

I wonder if my lost time is rolling around somewhere. I could have loved someone with that time -- I could have done something beautiful for someone. But I've nothing to show for that lost time. No waste, no ruin, no regrets, no pain. No feeling of having been alive.

There are two types of lives people can live,' he said. 'The kind of life in which one writes in a diary every day, and the kind of life in which one doesn't. They're as different as a country with a history and one without.

Aren't you scared?" "I am. But when you think about it there's no time in our lives we haven't been able to endure. If there was such a time, we wouldn't have made it this far. We live with happy memories. But we also live with unhappy memories. That's the power of loss and ruin.