Haruki Murakami Quotes
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A person's last moments are an important thing. You can't choose how you're born but you can choose how you die.
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I started writing at the kitchen table after midnight. It took ten months to finish that first book; I sent it to a publisher and I got some kind of prize, so it was like a dream - I was surprised to find it happening.
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He sometimes wondered if she had become involved with him just so that she could cry in someone's arms. Maybe she can't cry alone, and that's why she needs me.
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It was a strange feeling, like touching a void.
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Only people who have been discriminated against can really know how much it hurts. Each person feels the pain in his own way, each has his own scars. So I think I'm as concerned about fairness and justice as anybody. But what disgusts me even more are people who have no imagination. The kind T. S. Elliot calls 'hollow men'. People who fill up that lack of imagination with heartless bits of straw, not even aware of what they're doing. Callous people who throw a lot of empty words at you, trying to force you to do what you don't want to.
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Age certainly hadn't conferred any smarts on me. Character maybe, but mediocrity is a constant, as one Russian writer put it. Russian writers have a way with aphorisms. They probably spend all winter thinking them up.
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Listen up—there’s no war that will end all wars,’ Crow tells me. ‘War breeds war. Lapping up the blood shed by violence, feeding on wounded flesh. War is a perfect, self-contained being. You need to know that.
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I think of myself as more the non-turn-on type. so when I do get turned on, I don’t trust it, I have to investigate the source.
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There are ways of dying that don't end in funerals. Types of death you can't smell.
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Whenever I get into something, I shut out everything else.
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Anyone who falls in love is searching for the missing pieces of themselves. So anyone who's in love gets sad when they think of their lover. It's like stepping back inside a room you have fond memories of, one you haven't seen in a long time.
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When I start to write, I don't have any plan at all. I just wait for the story to come.
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It's the same with menus and men and just about anything else: we think we're choosing things for ourselves, but in fact we may not be choosing anything. It could be that everthing's being decided in advance and we pretend we're making choices. Free will may be an illusion. I often think that.
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One heart is not connected to another through harmony alone. They are, instead, linked deeply through their wounds.
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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.
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Many are the women who can take their clothes off seductively, but women who can charm as they dress?
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Please remember: things are not what they seem.
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Things like that happen all the time in this great big world of ours. It's like taking a boat out on a beautiful lake on a beautiful day and thinking both the sky and the lake are beautiful. So stop eating yourself up alive. Things will go where they're supposed to go if you just let them take their natural course.
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For some reason all the middle-aged women he knew were very efficient.
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A deserted library in the morning - there's something about it that really gets to me. All possible words and ideas are there, resting peacefully.
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No matter where i go, i still end up me. What's missing never changes. The scenery may change, but i'm still the same incomplete person. The same missing elements torture me with a hunger that i can never satisfy. I think that lack itself is as close as i'll come to defining myself.
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There's a special feeling you get on a veranda that you just can't get anywhere else.
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There were plenty of women around who dressed smartly, and plenty more who dressed to impress, but this girl was different. Totally different. She wore her clothing with such utter naturalness and grace that she could have been a bird that had wrapped itself in a special wind as it made ready to fly off to another world. He had never seen a woman who wore her clothes with such apparent joy. And the clothes themselves looked as if, in being draped on her body, they had won new life for themselves.
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A story is not something of this world. A real story requires a kind of magical baptism to link the world on this side with the world on the other side.