Haruki Murakami Quotes
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If only I could fall sound asleep and wake up in my old reality!
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Passion can’t sustain itself forever.
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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.
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But actually time isn't a straight line. It doesn't ave a shape. In all senses of the term, it doesn't have any form. But since we can't picture something without form in our minds, for the sake of convenience we understand it as a straight line. At this point, humans are the only ones who can make that sort of conceptual substitution.
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Genius or fool, you don't live in the world alone. You can hide underground or you can build a wall around yourself, but somebody's going to come along and screw up the works.
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This uneasiness comes over me from time to time, and I feel as if I've somehow been pieced together from two different puzzles.
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Everybody burns out in this world; amateur, pro, it doesn't matter, they all burn out, they all get hurt, the OK guys and the not-OK guys both. That's why everybody takes out a little insurance. I've got some too, here at the bottom of the heap. That way, you manage to survive if you burn out. If you're all by yourself and don't belong anywhere, you go down once, and you're out. Finished.
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Everyone who has something is afraid of losing it, and people with nothing are worried they'll forever have nothing. Everyone is the same.
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It's true that at the time I was fond of Kurt Vonnegut and Richard Brautigan, and it was from them that I learned about this kind of simple, swift-paced style, but the main reason for the style of my first novel is that I simply did not have the time to write sustained prose.
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The Earth, time, concepts, love, life, faith justice, evil - they're all fluid and in transition. They don't stay in one form or in one place forever. The whole universe is like some big FedEx box.
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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.
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I’ve never once thought about how I was going to die,” she said. “I can’t think about it. I don’t even know how I’m going to live.
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A poet might die at twenty-one, a revolutionary or a rock star at twenty four. But after that you assume everything’s going to be all right. you’ve made it past Dead Man’s Curve and you’re out of the tunnel, cruising straight for your destination down a six lane highway whether you want it or not.
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Maybe it's just hiding somewhere. Or gone on a trip to come home. But falling in love is always a pretty crazy thing. It might appear out of the blue and just grab you. Who knows — maybe even tomorrow.
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I may not be the most likable person in the world, but I try not to upset people.
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I could disappear from the face of the earth, and the world would go on moving without the slightest twinge. Things were tremendously complicated, to be sure, but one thing was clear: no one needed me.
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I think that my job is to observe people and the world, and not to judge them. I always hope to position myself away from so-called conclusions. I would like to leave everything wide open to all the possibilities in the world.
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Gazing at the rain, I consider what it means to belong, to become part of something. To have someone cry for me.
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I have these realistic dreams and snap wide awake in the middle of the night. And for a while I can't work out what's real and what isn't... That kind of feeling. Do you have any idea what I'm saying?
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To me, love is a pure idea forged in flesh, awkwardly maybe, but it had to connect to somewhere, despite twists and turns of underground cable. An all-too-perfect thing. Sometimes the lines get crossed. Or you get a wrong number. But that's nobody's fault. It'll always be like that, so long as we exist in this physical form. As a matter of principle.
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Have you ever had that feeling—that you’d like to go to a whole different place and become a whole different self?
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Even if we could turn back, we'd probably never end up where we started.
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But if something did happen, it happened. Whether it's right or wrong. I accept everything that happens, and that's how I became the person I am now.
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Listen - God only exists in people's minds. Especially in Japan, God's always been kind of a flexible concept. Look at what happened after the war. Douglas MacArthur ordered the divine emperor to quit being God, and he did, making a speech saying he was just an ordinary person. So after 1946 he wasn't God anymore. That's what Japanese gods are like--they can be tweaked and adjusted. Some American comping on a cheap pipe gives the order and presto change-o--God's no longer God. A very postmodern kind of thing. If you think God's there, He is. If you don't, He isn't.