Haruki Murakami Quotes
-
Don’t you see? You and he might never cross paths again. Of course, a chance meeting could occur, and I hope it happens. I really do, for your sake. But realistically speaking, you have to see there’s a huge possibility you’ll never be able to meet him again. And even if you do meet, he might already be married to somebody else. He might have two kids. Isn’t that so? And in that case, you may have to live the rest of your life alone, never being joined with the one person you love in all the world. Don’t you find that scary?
-
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.
-
What matters is deciding in your heart to accept another person completely. When you do that, it is always the first time and the last.
-
Irrepressible curiosity vied with an instinctive fear.
-
As long as an individual's alive, he will undergo experience in some form or other, and those experiences are stored up instant by instant. To stop experiencin' is to die.
-
Although I didn't think so at the time, things were a lot simpler in 1969. All you had to do to express yourself was throw rocks at riot police. But with today's sophistication, who's in a position to throw rocks? Who's going to brave what tear gas? C'mon, that's the way it is. Everything is rigged, tied into that massive capital web, and beyond this web there's another web. Nobody's going anywhere. You throw a rock and it'll come right back at you.
-
She's always polite and kind, but her words lack the kind of curiosity and excitement you'd normally expect. Her true feelings- assuming such things exist- remain hidden away. Except for when a practical sort of decision has to be made, she never gives her personal opinion about anything. She seldom talks about herself, instead letting others talk, nodding warmly as she listens. But most people start to feel vaguely uneasy when talking with her, as if they suspect they're wasting her time, trampling on her private, graceful, dignified world. And that impression is, for the most part, correct.
-
Time passes slowly. Nobody says a word, everyone lost in quiet reading. One person sits at a desk jotting down notes, but the rest are sitting there silently, not moving, totally absorbed. Just like me.
-
Sheep hurt my father, and through my father, sheep have also hurt me.
-
Precipitate as weather, she appeared from somewhere, then evaporated, leaving only memory.
-
You're wrong. The mind is not like raindrops. It does not fall from the skies, it does not lose itself among other things. If you believe in me at all, then believe this: I promise you I will find it. Everything depends on this." "I believe you," she whispers after a moment. "Please find my mind.
-
If I'm going to merely ramble, maybe I should just snuggle under the warm covers, think of Miu, and play with myself.
-
I'm a very ordinary human being; I just happen to like reading books.
-
What do I like about math? , When I've got figures in front of me, it relaxes me. Kind of like, everything fits where it belongs.
-
Now for a good twelve-hour sleep, I told myself. Twelve solid hours. Let birds sing, let people go to work. Somewhere out there, a volcano might blow, Israeli commandos might decimate a Palestinian village. I couldn't stop it. I was going to sleep.
-
I was always hungry for love. Just once, I wanted to know what it was like to get my fill of it -- to be fed so much love I couldn't take any more. Just once.
-
As long as I was alive, I was something. That was just how it was. But somewhere along the way it all changed. Living turned me into nothing.
-
I’m not good at talking,” Naoko said. “Haven’t been for the longest while. I start to say something and the wrong words come out. Wrong or sometimes completely backward. I try to go back and correct it, but things get even more complicated and confused, so that I don’t even remember what I started to say in the first place. Like I was split into two or something, one half chasing the other. And there’s this big pillar in the middle and they go chasing each other around and around it. The other me always latches onto the right word and this me absolutely never catches up.
-
She's kind of funny looking. Her face is out of balance--broad forehead, button nose, freckled cheeks, and pointy ears. A slammed-together, rough sort of face you can't ignore. Still, the whole package isn't so bad. For all I know maybe she's not so wild about her own looks, but she seems comfortable with who she is, and that's the important thing.
-
It’s pretty thin, the wall separating healthy confidence and unhealthy Pride.
-
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.
-
A man is like a two-story house. The first floor is equipped with an entrance and a living room. On the second floor is every family member's room. They enjoy listening to music and reading books. On the first underground floor is the ruin of people's memories. The room filled with darkness is the second underground floor.
-
It's a dark, cool, quiet place. A basement in your soul. And that place can sometimes be dangerous to the human mind. I can open the door and enter that darkness, but I have to be very careful. I can find my story there. Then I bring that thing to the surface, into the real world.
-
Then I noticed that my shadow was crying too, shedding clear, sharp shadow tears. Have you ever seen the shadows of tears, Mr. Wind-Up Bird? They’re nothing like ordinary shadows. Nothing at all. They come here from some other, distant world, especially for our hearts. Or maybe not. It struck me then that the tears my shadow was shedding might be the real thing, and the tears that I was shedding were just shadows. You don’t get it, I’m sure, Mr. Wind-Up Bird. When a naked seventeen-year-old girl is shedding tears in the moonlight, anything can happen. It’s true.