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As long as you have the courage to admit mistakes, things can be turned around.
Haruki Murakami
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You live by yourself for a stretch of time and you get to staring at different objects. Sometimes you talk to yourself. You take meals in crowded joints. You develop an intimate relationship with your used Subaru. You slowly but surely become a has-been.
Haruki Murakami
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My peak? Would I even have one? I hardly had had anything you could call a life. A few ripples, some rises and falls. But that's it. Almost nothing. Nothing born of nothing. I'd loved and been loved, but I had nothing to show. It was a singularly plain, featureless landscape. I felt like I was in a video game. A surrogate Pacman, crunching blindly through a labyrinth of dotted lines. The only certainty was my death.
Haruki Murakami
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Why do people have to be this lonely? What's the point of it all? Millions of people in this world, all of them yearning, looking to others to satisfy them, yet isolating themselves. Why? Was the earth put here just to nourish human loneliness?
Haruki Murakami
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At any rate, that’s how I started running. Thirty three—that’s how old I was then. Still young enough, though no longer a young man. The age that Jesus Christ died. The age that Scott Fitzgerald started to go downhill. That age may be a kind of crossroads in life. That was the age when I began my life as a runner, and it was my belated, but real, starting point as a novelist.
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 is my huge pleasure that my novels are translated into languages that are read among small numbers of people.
Haruki Murakami
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I started writing at the kitchen table after midnight. It took ten months to finish that first book; I sent it to a publisher and I got some kind of prize, so it was like a dream - I was surprised to find it happening.
Haruki Murakami
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Even if we could turn back, we'd probably never end up where we started.
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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Gays, lesbians, straights, feminists, fascist pigs, communists, Hare Krishnas - none of them bother me. I don't care what banner they raise. But what I can't stand are hollow people. When I'm with them I just can't bare it, and wind up saying things I shouldn't.
Haruki Murakami
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It is however, difficult to make your narratives relative by yourself. A novelists' work is to provide models to make your narratives relative. If you read my novels then you may feel, "I have the same experience as this narrative", or "I have the same idea as this novel". It means that your narrative and mine sympathize, concord and resonate together.
Haruki Murakami
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Memory is so crazy! It's like we've got these drawers crammed with tons of useless stuff. Meanwhile, all the really important things we just keep forgetting, one after the other.
Haruki Murakami
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If they invent a car that runs on stupid jokes, you could go far.
Haruki Murakami
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Autumn finally arrived. And when it did, I came to a decision. Something had to give: I couldn't keep on living like this.
Haruki Murakami
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To keep on going, you have to keep up the rhythm.
Haruki Murakami
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One impossible day, of an impossible month, of an impossible year.
Haruki Murakami
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With luck, it might even snow for us.
Haruki Murakami
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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.
Haruki Murakami
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Either I'm funny or the world's funny. I don't know which. The bottle and lid don't fit. It could be the bottle's fault or the lid's fault. In either case, there's no denying that the fit is bad.
Haruki Murakami
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Being alive, if you had to define it, meant emitting a variety of smells.
Haruki Murakami
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If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking.
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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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
