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If you can love someone with your whole heart, even one person, then there's salvation in life. Even if you can't get together with that person.
Haruki Murakami
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A friend to kill time is a friend sublime.
Haruki Murakami
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If you try to use your head to think about things, people don't want to have anything to do with you.
Haruki Murakami
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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.
Haruki Murakami
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The good thing about writing books is that you can dream while you are awake. If it’s a real dream, you cannot control it. When writing the book, you are awake; you can choose the time, the length, everything. I write for four or five hours in the morning and when the time comes, I stop. I can continue the next day. If it’s a real dream, you can’t do that.
Haruki Murakami
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Sometimes I feel so- I don’t know - lonely. The kind of helpless feeling when everything you’re used to has been ripped away. Like there’s no more gravity, and I’m left to drift in outer space with no idea where I’m going’ Like a little lost Sputnik?’ I guess so.
Haruki Murakami
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How many times have you said, 'This is it. I've finally found my one true love'? And how many times has the reality turned out differently? Paperback romances and fairy tales promote an ideal of a first and only love, but few of us can claim to have had such uncomplicated good fortune. For most people, the process of finding the perfect partner is one trial and error: breakups, makeups, missed opportunities and misunderstandings. Human love is a fragile creation, and sometimes the smallest thing - the wrong choice of words or a single clumsy gesture - can make love shatter, stall or fade away.
Haruki Murakami
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Nothing so consumes a person as meaningless exertion.
Haruki Murakami
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In dreams you don't need to make any distinctions between things. Not at all. Boundaries don't exist. So in dreams there are hardly ever collisions. Even if there are, they don't hurt. Reality is different. Reality bites. Reality, reality.
Haruki Murakami
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Those were strange days, now that I look back at them. In the midst of life, everything revolved around death.
Haruki Murakami
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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.
Haruki Murakami
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When a writer develops a story, he is confronted with a poison that is inside him. If you don't have that poison, your story will be boring and uninspired. It's like fugu: The flesh of the pufferfish is extremely tasty, but the roe, the liver, the heart can be lethally toxic.
Haruki Murakami
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How many Sundays - how many hundreds of Sundays like this - lay ahead of me? “Quiet, peaceful, and lonely,” I said aloud to myself. On Sundays, I didn't wind my spring.
Haruki Murakami
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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.
Haruki Murakami
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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.
Haruki Murakami
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That's why I like listening to Schubert while I'm driving. Like I said, it's because all his performances are imperfect. A dense, artistic kind of imperfection stimulates your consciousness, keeps you alert. If I listen to some utterly perfect performance of an utterly perfect piece while I'm driving, I might want to close my eyes and die right then and there. But listening to the D major, I can feel the limits of what humans are capable of - that a certain type of perfection can only be realized through a limitless accumulation of the imperfect. And personally I find that encouraging.
Haruki Murakami
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If you think of someone enough, you’re sure to meet them again.
Haruki Murakami
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Whatever can't be expressed might as well not exist.
Haruki Murakami
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This was never any place I was meant to be. This isn’t a place for me.
Haruki Murakami
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Love can rebuild the world, they say, so everything's possible when it comes to love.
Haruki Murakami
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The world is full of ways and means to waste time.
Haruki Murakami
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No matter what the situation may be, I still take pleasure in witnessing the joy of others.
Haruki Murakami
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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.
Haruki Murakami
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I was reduced to pure concept. My flesh had dissolved; my form had dissipated. I floated in space. Liberated of my corporeal being, but without dispensation to go anywhere else.I was adrift in the void. Somewhere across the fine line separating nightmare from reality.
Haruki Murakami
