"Nobody's going to read it now," Hoshino said. "I don't know what was written in it, but it's all gone. A bit of shape and form has disappeared from the world, increasing the amount of nothingness."
"Mr Hoshino?"
"What's up?"
"I have a question I'd like to ask."
"Fire away."
"Can nothingness increase?"
Hoshino puzzled this one over for a while. "That's a tough one," he admitted. "If something returns to nothing it becomes zero, but even if you add zero to zero, it's still zero."
"I don't understand."
"I don't really get it either. Thinking about those kinds of things always gives me a headache."
"So maybe we should stop thinking about it."
Haruki Murakami - Kafka on the Shore

"As long as I was alive, I was something. That was just how it was. But somewhere along the way it all changed. Living turned me into nothing. Weird... People are born in order to live, right? But the longer I've lived, the more I've lost what's inside me - and ended up empty. And I bet the longer I live, the emptier, the more worthless, I'll become. Something's wrong with this picture. Life isn't supposed to turn out like this! Isn't it possible to shift direction, to change where I'm headed?"
Haruki Murakami - Kafka on the Shore