Haruki Murakami Quotes
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I guess I felt attached to my weakness. My pain and suffering too. Summer light, the smell of a breeze, the sound of cicadas - if I like these things, why should I apologize?
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So I'm not crazy after all! I thought it looked good myself once I cut it all off. Not one guy likes it, though. They all tell me I look like a first grader or a concentration camp survivor. What's this thing that guys have for girls with long hair? Fascists, the whole bunch of them! Why do guys all think girls with long hair are the classiest, the sweetest, the most feminine? I mean, I myself know at least two hundred and fifty unclassy girls with long hair. Really.
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Of course life frightens me sometimes. I don't happen to take that as the premise for everything else though. I'm going to give it hundred percent and go as far as I can. I'll take what I want and leave what I don't want. That's how I intend to live my life, and it things go bad, I'll stop and reconsider at that point. If you think about it, an unfair society is a society that makes it possible for you to exploit your abilities to the limit.
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Irrepressible curiosity vied with an instinctive fear.
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I'm not going to get involved in a debate with you. Just remember this: the gods give, and the gods take away. Even if you are not aware of having been granted what you posses, the gods remember what they gave you. They don't forget a thing. You should use the abilities you have been granted with the utmost care.
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I have read all my novels that were translated into English. Reading my novels is enjoyable because I forget almost all the content in them.
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That's wrong," she declared. "Everyone must have one thing that they can excel at. It's just a matter of drawing it out, isn't it? But school doesn't know how to draw it out. It crushes the gift. It's no wonder most people never get to be what they want to be. They just get ground down.
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How much do you love me?' Midori asked. 'Enough to melt all the tigers in the world to butter,' I said.
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What do I like about math? , When I've got figures in front of me, it relaxes me. Kind of like, everything fits where it belongs.
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Everybody thinks I'm this delicate little girl. But you can't tell a book by it's cover.' To which she added a momentary smile.
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You know what girls are like. They turn twenty or twenty-one and all of a sudden they start having these concrete ideas. They get super realistic. And when that happens, everything that seemed so sweet and lovable about them begins to look ordinary and depressing.
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In Japan, the writers have made up a literary community, a circle, a society. I think 90 percent of Japan's writers live in Tokyo. Naturally, they make a community. There are groups and customs, and so they are tied up in a way.
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Fate is like a small sandstorm that keeps changing directions. You change direction but the sandstorm chases you. You turn again, but the storm adjusts. Over and over you play this out, like some ominous dance with death just before dawn. Why? Because this storm isn't something that blew in from far away, something that has nothing to do with you. This storm is you. Something inside of you. So all you can do is give in to it, step right inside the storm, closing your eyes and plugging up your ears so the sand doesn't get in, and walk through it, step by step.
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How many Sundays - how many hundreds of Sundays like this - lay ahead of me? “Quiet, peaceful, and lonely,” I said aloud to myself. On Sundays, I didn't wind my spring.
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I’m not good at talking,” Naoko said. “Haven’t been for the longest while. I start to say something and the wrong words come out. Wrong or sometimes completely backward. I try to go back and correct it, but things get even more complicated and confused, so that I don’t even remember what I started to say in the first place. Like I was split into two or something, one half chasing the other. And there’s this big pillar in the middle and they go chasing each other around and around it. The other me always latches onto the right word and this me absolutely never catches up.
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I don't know a whole lot about symbolism. There seems to me to be a potential danger in symbolism. I feel more comfortable with metaphors and similes.
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When I was a teenager, I thought how great it would be if only I could write novels in English. I had the feeling that I would be able to express my emotions so much more directly than if I wrote in Japanese.
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We were young, and we had no need for prophecies. Just living was itself an act of prophecy.
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With the advent of winter, her eyes seemed to take on a greater transparency, a transparency that lead nowhere. Occassionally, for no particular reason, Naoko would gaze into my eyes as if searching for something. Each time I was filled with odd sensations of lonliness and inadequecy.
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I think people who share my dreams can enjoy reading my novels. And that's a wonderful thing. I said that myths are like a reservoir of stories, and if I can act as a similar kind of "reservoir," albeit a modest one, that would make me very happy.
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Sometimes I feel like a caretaker of a museum -- a huge, empty museum where no one ever comes, and I'm watching over it for no one but myself.
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Life is here, death is over there. I am here, not over there.
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Sometimes I find it too hot to run, and sometimes too cold. Or too cloudy. But I still go running. I know that if I didn't go running, I wouldn't go the next day either. It's not in human nature to take unnecessary burdens upon oneself, so one's body soon becomes disaccustomed. It mustn't do that. It's the same with writing. I write every day so that my mind doesn't become disaccustomed.
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I'm always tripped up by the eternal who am I?