Haruki Murakami Quotes
-
I'm not sure if I could tell the difference—between just staring into space and thinking. We're usually thinking all the time, aren't we? Not that we live in order to think, but the opposite isn't true either—that we think in order to live. I believe, contrary to Descartes, that we sometimes think in order not to be. Staring into space might unintentionally have the opposite effect.
-
I’m just kinda tired. Like a monkey in the rain.
-
It seems to me, though, that you always understand very well what I can't say very well. Trouble is I end up being even worse at saying things well.
-
Is it possible, in the final analysis, for one human being to achieve perfect understanding of another? We can invest enormous time and energy in serious efforts to know another person, but in the end, how close can we come to that person's essence? We convince ourselves that we know the other person well, but do we really know anything important about anyone?
-
People lose fifty million skin cells every day. The cells get scraped off and turn into invisible dust, and disappear into the air. Maybe we are nothing but skin cells as far as the world is concerned.
-
What I feel for her is a wholly different emotion. It stands and walks on its own, living and breathing and throbbing and shaking me to the roots of my being.
-
Like most novelists, I like to do exactly the opposite of what I'm told. It's in my nature as a novelist. Novelists can't trust anything they haven't seen with their own eyes or touched with their own hands.
-
It's not right for one friend to do all the giving and the other to do all the taking: that's not real friendship.
-
We can, if we so choose, wander aimlessly over the continent of the arbitrary. Rootless as some winged seed blown about on a serendipitous spring breeze.
-
Let the world move along as it pleased. If it had any business with him, it would be sure to tell him.
-
Confidence; as a teenager? Because I knew what I loved. I loved to read; I loved to listen to music; and I love cats. Those three things. So, even though I was an only kid, I could be happy because I knew what I loved.
-
As with marathon runs and lengths of toilet paper, there had to be standards to measure up to.
-
But even so, every now and then I would feel a violent stab of loneliness. The very water I drink, the very air I breathe, would feel like long, sharp needles. The pages of a book in my hands would take on the threatening metallic gleam of razor blades. I could hear the roots of loneliness creeping through me when the world was hushed at four o'clock in the morning.
-
You can’t look too far ahead. Do that and you’ll lose sight of what you’re doing and stumble. I’m not saying you should focus solely on the details right in front of you, mind you. You’ve got to look ahead a bit or else you’ll bump into something. You’ve got to conform to the proper order and at the same time keep an eye out for what’s ahead. That’s critical, no matter what you’re doing.
-
Is it against the law for me to know it?
-
Judging the mistakes of strangers is an easy thing to do - and it feels pretty good.
-
We knew exactly what we wanted in each other. And even so, it ended. One day it stopped, as if the film simply slipped off the reel.
-
And as the years have passed, the time has grown longer. The sad truth is that what I could recall in five seconds all too needed ten, then thirty, then a full minute - like shadows lengthening at dusk. Someday, I suppose, the shadows will be swallowed up in darkness.
-
The better you were able to imagine what you wanted to imagine, the farther you could flee from reality.
-
I said nothing for a time, just ran my fingertips along the edge of the human-shaped emptiness that had been left inside me.
-
The fresh smell of coffee soon wafted through the apartment, the smell that separates night from day.
-
I'm not so weird to me.
-
I'd made it back to the land of the living. No matter how boring or mediocre a world it might be, this was it.
-
Some things, you know, if you say them, it makes them not true?