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This is no honky-tonk parade. 1Q84 is the real world, where a cut draws real blood, where pain is real pain and fear is real fear. The moon in the sky is no paper moon.
Haruki Murakami
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So I made up my mind I was going to find someone who would love me unconditionally three hundred and sixty-five days a year. Watanabe: Wow, and did your search pay off? M: That's the hard part. I guess I've been waiting so long I'm looking for perfection. That makes it tough.
Haruki Murakami
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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.
Haruki Murakami
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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.
Haruki Murakami
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I realize full well how hard it must be to go on living alone in a place from which someone has left you, but there is nothing so cruel in this world as the desolation of having nothing to hope for.
Haruki Murakami
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All over the world people have developed their own ideas about what's right and wrong in life, but so long as you aren't harming others or the Earth, it's your choice when you decide how you want to live your life - Yours and yours alone. Life's no piece of cake, mind you, but the recipe's my own to fool with.
Haruki Murakami
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The pure present is an ungraspable advance of the past devouring the future. In truth, all sensation is already memory.
Haruki Murakami
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You might think you made a new world or a new self, but your old self is always gonna be there, just below the surface, and if something happens, it'll stick its head out and say 'Hi.' You don't seem to realize that. You were made somewhere else.
Haruki Murakami
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It is not that the meaning cannot be explained. But there are certain meanings that are lost forever the moment they are explained in words.
Haruki Murakami
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I would never see her again, except in memory. She was here, and now she's gone. There is no middle ground. Probably is a word that you may find south of the border. But never, ever west of the sun.
Haruki Murakami
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From the girl who sat before me now...surged a fresh and physical life force. She was like a small animal that has popped into the world with the coming of spring. Her eyes moved like an independent organism with joy, laughter, anger, amazement, and despair. I hadn't seen a face so vivid and expressive in ages, and I enjoyed watching it live and move.
Haruki Murakami
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Start making excuses and there's no end to it. I can't live that kind of life.
Haruki Murakami
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It takes years to build up, it takes moments to destroy.
Haruki Murakami
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The sad truth is that certain types of things can't go backward. Once they start going forward, no matter what you do, they can't go back the way they were. If even one little thing goes awry, then that's how it will stay forever.
Haruki Murakami
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I think of rivers, of tides. Forests and water gushing out. Rain and lightning. Rocks and shadows. All of these are in me.
Haruki Murakami
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Passion can’t sustain itself forever.
Haruki Murakami
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Shakespeare said it best,' Tamaru said quietly as he gazed at that lumpish, misshapen head. 'Something along these lines: if we die today, we do not have to die tomorrow, so let us look to the best in each other.
Haruki Murakami
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Where are you now?’ Where was I now? Gripping the receiver, I raised my hand and turned to see what lay beyond the telephone booth. Where was I now? I had no idea. No idea at all. Where was this place? All that flashed into my eyes were the countless shapes of people walking by to nowhere. Again and again, I called out for Midori from the dead center of this place that was no place.
Haruki Murakami
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Silence. How long it lasted, I couldn't tell. It might have been five seconds, it might have been a minute. Time wasn't fixed. It wavered, stretched, shrank. Or was it me that wavered, stretched, and shrank in the silence? I was warped in the folds of time, like a reflection in a fun house mirror.
Haruki Murakami
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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.
Haruki Murakami
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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.
Haruki Murakami
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Ice contains no future , just the past, sealed away. As if they're alive, everything in the world is sealed up inside, clear and distinct. Ice can preserve all kinds of things that way- cleanly, clearly. That's the essence of ice, the role it plays.
Haruki Murakami
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Young people these days don't trust anything at all. They want to be free.
Haruki Murakami
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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.
Haruki Murakami
