Haruki Murakami Quotes
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Have your dream...What you need now more than anything is discipline. Cast off mere words. Words turn into stone. (from Thailand)
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Mental acuity was never born from comfortable circumstances.
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Being alive, if you had to define it, meant emitting a variety of smells.
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But who can say what's best? That's why you need to grab whatever chance you have of happiness where you find it, and not worry about other people too much. My experience tells me that we get no more than two or three such chances in a life time, and if we let them go, we regret it for the rest of our lives.
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It's good when food tastes good, it's kind of like proof you're alive.
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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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All right, then, I thought: here I am in the bottom of a well.
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Holding this soft, small living creature in my lap this way, though, and seeing how it slept with complete trust in me, I felt a warm rush in my chest. I put my hand on the cat's chest and felt his heart beating. The pulse was faint and fast, but his heart, like mine, was ticking off the time allotted to his small body with all the restless earnestness of my own.
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But metaphors help eliminate what separates you and me.
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That’s what love’s all about. You’re the only one having those wonderful feelings, but you have to go it alone as you wander through the dark your mind and body have to bear it all. All by yourself.
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Life: I'll never understand it.
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When I was fifteen, all I wanted was to go off to some other world, a place beyond anybody’s reach. A place beyond the flow of time.” - But there’s no place like that in this world. - Exactly. Which is why I’m living here, in this world where things are continually damaged, where the heart is fickle, where time flows past without a break.
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Whatever it is you're seeking won't come in the form you're expecting.
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It’s pretty thin, the wall separating healthy confidence and unhealthy Pride.
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The sense of tragedy - according to Aristotle - comes, ironically enough, not from the protagonist's weak points but from his good qualities. Do you know what I'm getting at? People are drawn deeper into tragedy not by their defects but by their virtues. ... But we accept irony through a device called metaphor. And through that we grow and become deeper human beings.
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It is sometimes necessary for each person. Fill up with delicious food, get drunk, sing loudly and chat frivolously.
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It was a strange feeling, like touching a void.
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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.
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Not that we were incompatible: we just had nothing to talk about.
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Listening to the music while stretching her body close to its limit, she was able to attain a mysterious calm. She was simultaneously the torturer and the tortured, the forcer and the forced. This sense of inner-directed self-sufficiency was what she wanted most of all. It gave her deep solace.
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It's not me but the world that's deranged.
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The pure present is an ungraspable advance of the past devouring the future. In truth, all sensation is already memory.
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Waves of thought are stirring. In a twilight corner of her consciousness, one tiny fragment and another tiny fragment call out wordlessly to eachother, their spreading ripples intermingling.
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He sometimes wondered if she had become involved with him just so that she could cry in someone's arms. Maybe she can't cry alone, and that's why she needs me.