Haruki Murakami Quotes
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I don't care what you do to me, but I don't want you to hurt me. I've had enough hurt already in my life. More than enough. Now I want to be happy.
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Those were strange days, now that I look back at them. In the midst of life, everything revolved around death.
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Thinking about spaghetti that boils eternally but is never done is a sad, sad thing.
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And when you come back to Japan next summer, let's have that date or whatever you want to call it. We can go to the zoo or the botanical garden or the aquarium, and then we'll have the most politically correct and scrumptious omelets we can find.
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Nothing so consumes a person as meaningless exertion.
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Never trust a man who carries a handkerchief, I always say. One of many prejudicial rules of thumb.
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Whiskey, like a beautiful woman, demands appreciation. You gaze first, then it's time to drink.
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The curious thing about individuals is that their singularity always goes beyond any category or generalization in the book.
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Life is so uncertain: you never know what could happen. One way to deal with that is to keep your pajamas washed.
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Kafka is one of my very favorite writers. Kafka's fictional world is already so complete that trying to follow in his steps is not just pointless, but quite risky, too. What I see myself doing, rather, is writing novels where, in my own way, I dismantle the fictional world of Kafka that itself dismantled the existing novelistic system.
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When I was little, I had this science book. There was a section on 'What would happen to the world if there was no friction?' Answer: 'Everything on earth would fly into space from the centrifugal force of revolution.' That was my mood.
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I'd be smiling and chatting away, and my mind would be floating around somewhere else, like a balloon with a broken string.
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I can bear any pain as long as it has meaning.
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Most people are not looking for provable truths. As you said, truth is often accompanied by intense pain, and almost no one is looking for painful truths. What people need is beautiful, comforting stories that make them feel as if their lives have some meaning. Which is where religion comes from.
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I'm going to take you out of here ... I'm going to take you home, to the world where you belong, where cats with bent tails live, and there are little backyards, and alarm clocks ring in the morning.
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If I stayed here, something inside me would be lost forever—something I couldn't afford to lose. It was like a vague dream, a burning, unfulfilled desire. The kind of dream people have only when they're seventeen.
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I hurt myself deeply, though at the time I had no idea how deeply. I should have learned many things from that experience, but when I look back on it, all I gained was one single, undeniable fact. That ultimately I am a person who can do evil. I never consciously tried to hurt anyone, yet good intentions notwithstanding, when necessity demanded, I could become completely self-centred, even cruel. I was the kind of person who could, using some plausible excuse, inflict on a person I cared for a wound that would never heal.
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We heard no other sounds. We met no other people. We saw only two bright red birds leap startled from the center of the meadow and dart into the woods.
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Everybody's born with some different thing at the core of their existence. And that thing, whatever it is, becomes like a heat source that runs each person from the inside. I have one too, of course. Like everybody else. But sometimes it gets out of hand. It swells or shrinks inside me, and it shakes me up. What I'd really like to do is find a way to communicate that feeling to another person.
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I used to think the years would go by in order, that you get older one year at a time. But it's not like that. It happens overnight.
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Become like a sheet of blotting paper and soak it all in. Later on you can figure out what to keep and what to unload.
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A friend to kill time is a friend sublime.
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In this world, there is no absolute good, no absolute evil," the man said. "Good and evil are not fixed, stable entities, but are continually trading places. A good may be transformed into an evil in the next second. And vice versa. Such was the way of the world that Dostoevsky depicted in The Brothers Karamazov. The most important thing is to maintain the balance between the constantly moving good and evil. If you lean too much in either direction, it becomes difficult to maintain actual morals. Indeed, balance itself is the good.
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This was never any place I was meant to be. This isn’t a place for me.