Haruki Murakami Quotes
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Here, too, a brand-new day is beginning. It could be a day like all the others, or it could be a day remarkable enough in many ways to remain in the memory. In either case, for now, for most people, it is a blank sheet of paper.
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There had to be something wrong with my life. I should have been born a Yugoslavian shepherd who looked up at the Big Dipper every night.
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If there's any guy crazy enough to attack me, I'm going to show him the end of the world -- close up. I'm going to let him see the kingdom come with his own eyes. I'm going to send him straight to the southern hemisphere and let the ashes of death rain all over him and the kangaroos and the wallabies.
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I realize now that the reality of things is not something you convey to people but something you make.
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Whatever it is you're seeking won't come in the form you're expecting.
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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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In Japan they prefer the realistic style. They like answers and conclusions, but my stories have none. I want to leave them wide open to every possibility. I think my readers understand that openness.
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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.
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Our memory is made up of our individual memories and our collective memories. The two are intimately linked. And history is our collective memory. If our collective memory is taken from us - is rewritten - we lose the ability to sustain our true selves.
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No matter what you tell me, no matter how legitimate your reasons, I can never just forget about you, I can never push the years we spent together out of my mind. I can't do it because it really happened, they are part of my life, and there is no way I can just erase them. That would be the same as erasing my own self.
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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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A gentleman is someone who does not what he wants to do, but what he should do.
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Open your eyes, train your ears, use your head. If a mind you have, then use it while you can.
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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.
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As I already explaned, I don't have any form. I'm a conceptual metaphysical object.
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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.
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Not just beautiful, though — the stars are like the trees in the forest, alive and breathing. And they’re watching me. What I’ve up till now, what I’m going to do — they know it all. Nothing gets past their watchful eyes. As I sit there under the shining night sky, again a violent fear takes hold of me. My heart’s pounding a mile a minute, and I can barely breathe. All these millions of stars looking down on me, and I’ve never given them more than a passing thought before. Not just the stars — how many other things haven’t I noticed in the world, things I know nothing about?
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Time moves in it special way in the middle of the night.
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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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No matter how clear things might become in the forest of story, there was never a clear-cut solution, as there was in math. The role of a story was, in the broadest terms, to transpose a problem into another form. Depending on the nature and the direction of the problem, a solution might be suggested in the narrative. Tengo would return to the real world with that solution in hand. It was like a piece of paper bearing the indecipherable text of a magic spell. It served no immediate practical purpose, but it contained a possibility.
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I’m me, and at the same time not me. That’s what it felt like. A very still, quiet feeling.
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I have a million things to talk to you about. All I want in this world is you. I want to see you and talk. I want the two of us to begin everything from the beginning.
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Not that we were incompatible: we just had nothing to talk about.
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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.