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For a long time, she held a special place in my heart. I kept this special place just for her, like a "Reserved" sign on a quiet corner table in a restaurant. Despite the fact that I was sure I'd never see her again.
Haruki Murakami
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Sheep hurt my father, and through my father, sheep have also hurt me.
Haruki Murakami
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Only where there is disillusionment and depression and sorrow does happiness arise; without the despair of loss, there is no hope.
Haruki Murakami
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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.
Haruki Murakami
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I'm always tripped up by the eternal who am I?
Haruki Murakami
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It's basically the same in all periods of societies. If you belong to the majority, you can avoid thinking about lots of troubling things.' 'And those troubling things are all you /can/ think about when you're one of the few.' 'That's about the size of it,' she said mournfully. 'But maybe, if you're in a situation like that, you learn to think for yourself.' 'Yes, but maybe what you end up thinking for yourself /about/ is all those troubling things.
Haruki Murakami
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He felt as if his heart had dried up. I needed her he thought. I needed someone like her to fill the void inside me. But I wasn’t able to fill the void inside her. Until the bitter end, the emptiness inside her was hers alone.
Haruki Murakami
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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.
Haruki Murakami
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Precipitate as weather, she appeared from somewhere, then evaporated, leaving only memory.
Haruki Murakami
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Sometimes when I'm with you, I remember things I lost when I was your age. Like I remember the sound of the rain and the smell of the wind.
Haruki Murakami
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It's like the Tibetan Wheel of the Passions. As the wheel turns, the values and feelings on the outer rim rise and fall, shining or sinking into darkness. But true love stays fastened to the axle and doesn't move.
Haruki Murakami
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Even castles in the sky can do with a fresh coat of paint.
Haruki Murakami
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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.
Haruki Murakami
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Wherever there's hope there's a trial.
Haruki Murakami
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One heart is not connected to another through harmony alone. They are, instead, linked deeply through their wounds. Pain linked to pain, fragility to fragility. There is no silence without a cry of grief, no forgiveness without bloodshed, no acceptance without a passage through acute loss. That is what lies at the root of true harmony.
Haruki Murakami
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I'm a very ordinary human being; I just happen to like reading books.
Haruki Murakami
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A short story I have written long ago would barge into my house in the middle of the night, shake me awake and shout, 'Hey,this is no time for sleeping! You can't forget me, there's still more to write!' Impelled by that voice, I would find myself writing a novel. In this sense, too, my short stories and novels connect inside me in a very natural, organic way.
Haruki Murakami
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Everything was too sharp and clear, so that I could never tell where to start- the way a map that shows too much can sometimes be useless.
Haruki Murakami
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Things like that happen all the time in this great big world of ours. It's like taking a boat out on a beautiful lake on a beautiful day and thinking both the sky and the lake are beautiful. So stop eating yourself up alive. Things will go where they're supposed to go if you just let them take their natural course.
Haruki Murakami
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I may not look it, but I can be a very patient guy. And killing time is one of my specialities.
Haruki Murakami
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But I didn't walk a single step. I stopped a lot to stretch, but I never walked. I didn't come here to walk. I came to run. That's the reason-the only reason-I flew all the way to the northern tip of Japan. No matter how slow I might run, I wasn't about to walk. That was the rule.
Haruki Murakami
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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.
Haruki Murakami
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Whether you take the doughnut hole as a blank space or as an entity unto itself is a purely metaphysical question and does not affect the taste of the doughnut one bit.
Haruki Murakami
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Open your eyes, train your ears, use your head. If a mind you have, then use it while you can.
Haruki Murakami
