Haruki Murakami Quotes
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Whether you take the doughnut hole as a blank space or as an entity unto itself is a purely metaphysical question and does not affect the taste of the doughnut one bit.
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There are ways of dying that don't end in funerals. Types of death you can't smell.
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I probably still haven’t completely adapted to the world. I don’t know, I feel like this isn’t the real world. The people, the scene: they just don’t seem real to me.
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I think I'll stay alive here a bit longer, and see with my own eyes what's going to happen. I can still die after that - it won't be too late. Probably.
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What a terrible thing it is to wound someone you really care for and to do it so unconsciously.
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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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George Orwell is half journalist, half fiction writer. I'm 100 percent fiction writer... I don't want to write messages. I want to write good stories. I think of myself as a political person, but I don't state my political messages to anybody.
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Whatever can't be expressed might as well not exist.
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"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."
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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.
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Things outside you are projections of what's inside you, and what's inside you is a projection of what's outside. So when you step into the labyrinth outside you, at the same time you're stepping into the labyrinth inside.
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Tell me, Doctor, are you afraid of death?" "I guess it depends on how you die.
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Of course you keep telling yourself there's something to be learned from everything, and growing old shouldn't be that hard. That's the general drift.
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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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The sky grew darker, painted blue on blue, one stroke at a time, into deeper and deeper shades of night.
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It was a strange feeling, like touching a void.
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When the fire goes out, you'll start feeling the cold. You'll wake up whether you want to or not.
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You know what I think?" she says. "That people's memories are maybe the fuel they burn to stay alive. Whether those memories have any actual importance or not, it doesn't matter as far as the maintenance of life is concerned. They're all just fuel. Advertising fillers in the newspaper, philosophy books, dirty pictures in a magazine, a bundle of ten-thousand-yen bills: when you feed 'em to the fire, they're all just paper.
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After all this, I won't start to hate you.
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Fate is like a small sandstorm that keeps changing directions. You change direction but the sandstorm chases you. You turn again, but the storm adjusts. Over and over you play this out, like some ominous dance with death just before dawn. Why? Because this storm isn't something that blew in from far away, something that has nothing to do with you. This storm is you. Something inside of you. So all you can do is give in to it, step right inside the storm, closing your eyes and plugging up your ears so the sand doesn't get in, and walk through it, step by step.
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Most human activities are predicated on the assumption that life goes on. If you take that premise away, what is there left?
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Death was not the opposite of life. It was already here, within my being, it had always been here, and no struggle would permit me to forget that.
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The pillow smells like the sunlight, a precious smell.
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Nights without work I spend with whisky and books.