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Until the bitter end, the emptiness inside her was hers alone.
Haruki Murakami -
So the fact that I’m me and no one else is one of my greatest assets. Emotional hurt is the price a person has to pay in order to be independent.
Haruki Murakami
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You got to know your limits. Once is enough, but you got to learn. A little caution never hurt anyone. A good woodsman has only one scar on him. No more, no less.
Haruki Murakami -
I wasn't in love with her. And she didn't love me. For me the question of love was irrelevant. What I sought was the sense of being tossed about by some raging, savage force, in the midst of which lay something absolutely crucial. I had no idea what that was. But I wanted to thrust my hand right inside her body and touch it, whatever it was.
Haruki Murakami -
It made her think of Laika, the dog. The man-made satellite streaking soundlessly across the blackness of outer space. The dark, lustrous eyes of the dog gazing out the tiny window. In the infinite loneliness of space, what could the dog possibly be looking at?
Haruki Murakami -
All of us are imperfect human beings living in an imperfect world.
Haruki Murakami -
As with marathon runs and lengths of toilet paper, there had to be standards to measure up to.
Haruki Murakami -
What I was chasing in circles must have been the tail of the darkness inside me.
Haruki Murakami
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It's basically impossible for everybody's justice to prevail or everybody's happiness to triumph, so chaos takes over.
Haruki Murakami -
Everyone who has something is afraid of losing it, and people with nothing are worried they'll forever have nothing. Everyone is the same.
Haruki Murakami -
What if I’ve forgotten the most important thing? What if somewhere inside me there is a dark limbo where all the truly important memories are heaped and slowly turning into mud?...the thought fills me with an almost unbearable sorrow.
Haruki Murakami -
If they invent a car that runs on stupid jokes, you could go far.
Haruki Murakami -
I don't go out of my way to make friends, that's all.
Haruki Murakami -
You know, they've got these chocolate assortments, and you like some but you don't like others? And you eat all the ones you like, and the only ones left are the ones you don't like as much? I always think about that when something painful comes up. Now I just have to polish these off, and everything'll be OK. Life is a box of chocolates. I suppose you could call it a philosophy.
Haruki Murakami
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If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking.
Haruki Murakami -
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 -
Everybody feels safe belonging not to the excluded minority but to the excluding majority. You think, Oh, I’m glad that’s not me. It’s basically the same in all periods in all societies. If you belong to the majority, you can avoid thinking about lots of troubling things.
Haruki Murakami -
In order to pin down reality as realilty, we need another reality to relativize the first. Yet that other reality requires a third reality to serve as its grounding. An endless chain is created within our consciousness, and it is the maintenance of this chain which produces the sensation that we are actually here, that we ourselves exist.
Haruki Murakami -
Before I became a writer, I was running a jazz bar in the center of Tokyo, which means that I worked in filthy air all the time late into the night. I was very excited when I started making a living out of my writing, and I decided, 'I will live in nothing but an absolutely healthy way.'
Haruki Murakami -
"They tell us that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself, but I don't believe that." he said. Then, a moment later, he added: "Oh, the fear is there, all right. It comes to us in many different forms, at different times, and overwhelms us. But the most frightening thing we can do at such times is to turn our backs on it, to close our eyes. For then we take the most precious thing inside us and surrender it to something else. In my case, that something was the wave."
Haruki Murakami
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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.
Haruki Murakami -
Whenever I look at the ocean, I always want to talk to people, but when I'm talking to people, I always want to look at the ocean.
Haruki Murakami -
Someone who can search for something is happy. Searching gives a meaning to life. Nowadays it’s not so easy to find something you might be looking for. The most important thing, however, is the search itself, the way you take. It’s not so important where it leads. that’s why my characters are always looking for something, maybe only a cat, a sheep or a wife, but that is at least the beginning of a story.
Haruki Murakami -
My priority is my books, at least at this point. What I have to do is write the narrative of this time.
Haruki Murakami