Haruki Murakami Quotes
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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.
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Once you let yourself grow close to someone, cutting the ties could be painful.
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Adults constantly raise the bar on smart children, precisely because they're able to handle it. The children get overwhelmed by the tasks in front of them and gradually lose the sort of openness and sense of accomplishment they innately have. When they're treated like that, children start to crawl inside a shell and keep everything inside. It takes a lot of time and effort to get them to open up again. Kids' hearts are malleable, but once they gel it's hard to get them back the way they were.
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But knowing what I don’t want to do doesn’t help me figure out what I do want to do. I could do just about anything if somebody made me. But I don’t have an image of the one thing I really want to do. That’s my problem now. I can’t find the image.
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By then running had entered the realm of the metaphysical. First there came the action of running, and accompanying it there was this entity known as me. I run; therefore I am.
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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?
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I said nothing for a time, just ran my fingertips along the edge of the human-shaped emptiness that had been left inside me.
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In a sense, I'm the one who ruined me: I did it myself.
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If you're going to while away the years, it's far better to live them with clear goals and fully alive then in a fog, and I believe # running helps you to do that. Exerting yourself to the fullest within your individual limits: that's the essence of running, and a metaphor for life.
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This place is too calm, too natural--too complete. I don't deserve it. At least not yet.
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I can be hurt, you know. I can get as exhausted as anybody else. I can feel so bad I want to cry, too.
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Some things, you know, if you say them, it makes them not true?
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It's all matter of attitude. You could let a lot of things bother you if you wanted to But it's pretty much the same anywhere you go, you can manage.
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I write my novels personally, desperately and non-negligently. When I write my novels, I think about my novels only, and never do other works.
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My biggest fault is that the faults I was born with grow bigger each year.
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My imagination is a kind of animal. So what I do is keep it alive.
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The better you were able to imagine what you wanted to imagine, the farther you could flee from reality.
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What’s most important is what you can’t see but can feel in your heart. To be able to grasp something of value, sometimes you have to perform seemingly inefficient acts. But even activities that appear fruitless don’t necessarily end up so. That’s the feeling I have, as someone who’s felt this, who’s experienced it.
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In the end, like so many beautiful promises in our lives, that dinner date never came to be.
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As with marathon runs and lengths of toilet paper, there had to be standards to measure up to.
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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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If you really want to know what's happening here and now, you've got to use your own eyes and your own judgment.
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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.
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That was the rule. Break one of my rules once, and I’m bound to break many more.