Haruki Murakami Quotes
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Wherever there's hope there's a trial.
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Losing you is most difficult for me, but the nature of my love for you is what matters. If it distorts into half-truth, then perhaps it is better not to love you. I must keep my mind but loose you.
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I was twenty-one at the time, about to turn twenty-two. No prospect of graduating soon, and yet no reason to quit school. Caught in the most curiously depressing circumstances. For months I'd been stuck, unable to take one step in any new direction. The world kept moving on; I alone was at a standstill. In the autumn, everything took on a desolate cast, the colors swiftly fading before my eyes. The sunlight, the smell of the grass, the faintest patter of rain, everything got on my nerves.
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Between the time the last train leaves and the first train arrives, the place changes: it's not the same as in daytime.
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Even chance meetings are the result of karma… Things in life are fated by our previous lives. That even in the smallest events there’s no such thing as coincidence.
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The point is, not to resist the flow. You go up when you're supposed to go up and down when you're supposed to go down. When you're supposed to go up, find the highest tower and climb to the top. When you're supposed to go down, find the deepest well and go down to the bottom. When there's no flow, stay still. If you resist the flow, everything dries up. If everything dries up, the world is darkness.
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No matter how much time passes, no matter what takes place in the interim, there are some things we can never assign to oblivion, memories we can never rub away.
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Of what value is a civilization that can't toast a piece of bread as ordered?
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Inside him, twenty years dissolved and mixed into one complex, swirling whole. Everything that had accumulated over the years-- all he had seen, all the words he has spoken, all the values he had held-- all of it coalesced into one solid, thick pillar in his heart, the core of which was spinning like a potter's wheel. Wordlessly, Tengo observed the scene, as if watching the destruction and rebirth of a planet.
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No matter where i go, i still end up me. What's missing never changes. The scenery may change, but i'm still the same incomplete person. The same missing elements torture me with a hunger that i can never satisfy. I think that lack itself is as close as i'll come to defining myself.
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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.
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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.
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As time goes on, you'll understand. What lasts, lasts; what doesn't, doesn't. Time solves most things. And what time can't solve, you have to solve yourself.
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I go back to the reading room, where I sink down in the sofa and into the world of The Arabian Nights. Slowly, like a movie fadeout, the real world evaporates. I'm alone, inside the world of the story. My favourite feeling in the world.
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When you are used to the kind of life -of never getting anything you want- you stop knowing what it is you want.
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The ocean was one of the greatest things he had ever seen in his life—bigger and deeper than anything he had imagined. It changed its color and shape and expression according to time and place and weather. It aroused a deep sadness in his heart, and at the same time it brought his heart peace and comfort.
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Whether it's good for anything or not, cool or totally uncool, in the final analysis what's most important is what you can't see but can feel in your heart.
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They were each like a mirror for the other, reflecting the changes in themselves.
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I’m free, I think. I shut my eyes and think hard and deep about how free I am, but I can’t really understand what it means. All I know is I’m totally alone. All alone in an unfamiliar place, like some solitary explorer who’s lost his compass and his map. Is this what it means to be free? I don’t know, and I give up thinking about it.
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These days I just can't seem to say what I mean. I just can't. Every time I try to say something, it misses the point. Either that or I end up saying the opposite of what I mean. The more I try to get it right the more mixed up it gets. Sometimes I can't even remember what I was trying to say in the first place. It's like my body's split in two and one of me is chasing the other me around a big pillar. We're running circles around it. The other me has the right words, but I can never catch her.
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You've already decided what you're going to do, and all that's left is to set the wheels in motion. I mean, it's your life. Basically, you gotta go with what you think is right.
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I'm kind of a low-key guy. The spotlight doesn't suit me. I'm more of a side dish--cole slaw or French fries or a Wham! backup singer.
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For novelists or musicians, if they really want to create something, they need to go downstairs and find a passage to get into the second basement. What I want to do is go down there, but still stay sane.
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Our memory is made up of our individual memories and our collective memories. The two are intimately linked. And history is our collective memory. If our collective memory is taken from us - is rewritten - we lose the ability to sustain our true selves.