Haruki Murakami Quotes
-
I myself have been on my own and utterly independent since I graduated. I haven't belonged to any company or any system. It isn't easy to live like this in Japan.
-
I closed my eyes and listened carefully for the descendants of Sputnik, even now circling the earth, gravity their only tie to the planet. Lonely metal souls in the unimpeded darkness of space, they meet, pass each other, and part, never to meet again. No words passing between them. No promises to keep.
-
Everyone who has something is afraid of losing it, and people with nothing are worried they'll forever have nothing. Everyone is the same.
-
When someone is trying very hard to get something, they don't. And when they're running away from something as hard as they can, it usually catches up with them.
-
I can't build a simple shelf. I have no idea how to change an oil filter on a car. I can't even stick a stamp on an envelope straight. And I'm always dialling the wrong number. But I have come up with a few original cocktails that people seem to like.
-
Life is here, death is over there. I am here, not over there.
-
Everybody has to start somewhere. You have your whole future ahead of you. Perfection doesn't happen right away.
-
There are symbolic dreams-- dreams that symbolize some reality. Then there are symbolic realities -- realities that symbolize a dream. Symbols are what you might call the honorary town councillors of the worm universe. In the worm universe, there is nothing unusual about a dairy cow seeking a pair of pliers. A cow is bound to get her pliers sometime. It has nothing to do with me.
-
The problem was, I think, that the places I fit in were always falling behind the rimes.
-
We were young, and we had no need for prophecies. Just living was itself an act of prophecy.
-
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.
-
What's nurtured slowly grows well.
-
Music brings a warm glow to my vision, thawing mind and muscle from their endless wintering.
-
It feels like everything's been decided in advance that I'm following a path somebody else has already mapped out for me. It doesn't matter how much I think things over, how much effort I put into it. In fact, the harder I try, the more I lose my sense of who I am. It's like my identity's an orbit that I've strayed far away from, and that really hurts. But more than that, it scares me. Just thinking about it makes me flinch.
-
I wasn't in love with her. And she didn't love me. For me the question of love was irrelevant. What I sought was the sense of being tossed about by some raging, savage force, in the midst of which lay something absolutely crucial. I had no idea what that was. But I wanted to thrust my hand right inside her body and touch it, whatever it was.
-
I happen to like the strange ones. People who look normal and leads normal lives - they're the ones you have to watch out for.
-
Constipation was one of the things she hated most in the world, on par with despicable men who commit domestic violence and narrow-minded religious fundamentalists.
-
Overhead, the two moons worked together to bathe the world in a strange light.
-
The morning air of the pasture turned steadily cooler. Day by day, the bright golden leaves of the birches turned more spotted as the first winds of winter slipped between the withered branches and across the highlands toward the southeast. Stopping in the center of the pasture, I could hear the winds clearly. No turning back, they pronounced. The brief autumn was gone.
-
In long-distance running the only opponent you have to beat is yourself, the way you used to be.
-
There's no war that will end all wars.
-
Nobody likes being alone that much. I don't go out of my way to make friends, that's all. It just leads to disappointment.
-
Two people can sleep in the same bed and still be alone when they close their eyes.
-
No matter what you tell me, no matter how legitimate your reasons, I can never just forget about you, I can never push the years we spent together out of my mind. I can't do it because it really happened, they are part of my life, and there is no way I can just erase them. That would be the same as erasing my own self.