Haruki Murakami Quotes
-
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.
-
But if you knew you might not be able to see it again tomorrow, everything would suddenly become special and precious, wouldn’t it?
-
I get up early in the morning, 4 o'clock, and I sit at my desk and what I do is just dream. After three or four hours, that's enough. In the afternoon, I run.
-
Each of us possesses a tangible living soul. The system has no such thing. We must not allow the system to exploit us.
-
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.
-
I saw that she was crying. Before I knew it, I was kissing her. Others on the platform were staring at us, but I didn't care about such things anymore. We were alive, she and I. And all we had to think about was continuing to live.
-
But metaphors help eliminate what separates you and me.
-
Some things in life are too complicated to explain in any language.
-
No matter what form the relationship might take, he was the only person she could picture sharing her life with.
-
Life: I'll never understand it.
-
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.
-
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.
-
My father always told me: 'Give somebody a hand and he'll take an arm.
-
People leave strange little memories of themselves behind when they die.
-
I think certain types of processes don’t allow for any variation. If you have to be part of that process, all you can do is transform—or perhaps distort—yourself through that persistent repetition, and make that process a part of your own personality.
-
Most everything you think you know about me is nothing more than memories.
-
The best way to think about reality, I had decided, was to get as far away from it as possible.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
Memories warm you up from the inside. But they also tear you apart.
-
The pure present is an ungraspable advance of the past devouring the future. In truth, all sensation is already memory.
-
Most young people were getting jobs in big companies, becoming company men. I wanted to be individual.
-
Have you ever had that feeling—that you’d like to go to a whole different place and become a whole different self?