Haruki Murakami Quotes

The sun sliced through the windshield, sealing me in light. I closed my eyes and felt the warmth on my eyelids. Sunlight traveled a long distance to reach this planet; an infinitesimal portion of that sunlight was enough to warm my eyelids. I was moved. That something as insignificant as an eyelid had its place in the workings on the universe, that the cosmic order did not overlook this momentary fact.

I was reborn," she said, her hot breath brushing his ear. "You were reborn," Tengo said. "Because I died once." "You died once," Tengo repeated. "On a night when there was a cold rain falling," she said. "Why did you die?" "So I would be reborn like this." "You would be reborn," Tengo said. "More or less," she whispered quietly. "In all sorts of forms.

What we see before us is just one tiny part of the world. We get in the habit of thinking, this is the world, but that's not true at all. The real world is a much darker and deeper place than this, and much of it is occupied by jellyfish and things.

The ground we stand on looks solid enough, but if something happens it can drop right out from under you.

The world is full of ways and means to waste time.

If you think about it, an unfair society is a society that makes it possible for you to exploit your abilities to the limit.

Music brings a warm glow to my vision, thawing mind and muscle from their endless wintering.

You know what girls are like. They turn twenty or twenty-one and all of a sudden they start having these concrete ideas. They get super realistic. And when that happens, everything that seemed so sweet and lovable about them begins to look ordinary and depressing.

There were plenty of women around who dressed smartly, and plenty more who dressed to impress, but this girl was different. Totally different. She wore her clothing with such utter naturalness and grace that she could have been a bird that had wrapped itself in a special wind as it made ready to fly off to another world. He had never seen a woman who wore her clothes with such apparent joy. And the clothes themselves looked as if, in being draped on her body, they had won new life for themselves.

Two-thirds of earth's surface is ocean, and all we can see with the naked eye is the surface.

You said you're going far away," Tamaru said. "How far away are we talking about?" "It's a distance that can't be measured." "Like the distance that separates one person's heart from another's.

People's memories are maybe the fuel they burn to stay alive.

Whenever she felt like crying, she would instead become angry—at someone else or at herself—which meant that it was rare for her to shed tears.

As a novelist, you could say that I am dreaming while I am awake, and every day I can continue with yesterday's dream. Because it is a dream, there are so many contradictions and I have to adjust them to make the story work. But, in principle, the original dream does not change.

I don't think of myself as an artist. I'm just a guy who can write.

We're both looking at the same moon, in the same world. We're connected to reality by the same line. All I have to do is quietly draw it towards me.

Genius or fool, you don't live in the world alone. You can hide underground or you can build a wall around yourself, but somebody's going to come along and screw up the works.

Listen - God only exists in people's minds. Especially in Japan, God's always been kind of a flexible concept. Look at what happened after the war. Douglas MacArthur ordered the divine emperor to quit being God, and he did, making a speech saying he was just an ordinary person. So after 1946 he wasn't God anymore. That's what Japanese gods are like--they can be tweaked and adjusted. Some American comping on a cheap pipe gives the order and presto change-o--God's no longer God. A very postmodern kind of thing. If you think God's there, He is. If you don't, He isn't.

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.

If you try to use your head to think about things, people don't want to have anything to do with you

A regular wind-up toy world this is, I think. Once a day the wind-up bird has to come and wind the springs of this world. Alone in this fun house, only I grow old, a pale softball of death swelling inside me. Yet even as I sleep somewhere between Saturn and Uranus, wind-up birds everywhere are busy at work fulfilling their appointed rounds.

You have to wait until tomorrow to find out what tomorrow will bring.

The rain that fell on the city runs down the dark gutters and empties into the sea without even soaking the ground

I realize now that the reality of things is not something you convey to people but something you make.

It's not me but the world that's deranged.

What happens when people open their hearts?"... "They get better.

The heavy smell of flower petals stroked the walls of my lungs.

Tengo could hardly believe it-- that in this frantic, labyrinth-like world, two people's hearts-- a boy's and a girl's-- could be connected, unchanged, even though they hadn't seen each other for twenty years.

Someone once said that nothing costs more and yields less benefit than revenge,” Aomame said. “Winston Churchill. As I recall it, though, he was making excuses for the British Empire’s budget deficits. It has no moral significance.

If only I could fall sound asleep and wake up in my old reality!

If a person remains tense for a long time he might not notice it himself, but it’s like his nerves are a piece of rubber that has been stretched out. It’s hard to go back to the original shape.

Living like an empty shell is not really living, no matter how many years it may go on. The heart and flesh of an empty shell give birth to nothing more than the life of an empty shell.

Of course it hurt that we could never love each other in a physical way. We would have been far more happy if we had. But that was like the tides, the change of seasons--something immutable, an immovable destiny we could never alter. No matter how cleverly we might shelter it, our delicate friendship wasn't going to last forever. We were bound to reach a dead end. That was painfully clear.

She lived frugally, but her meals were the only things on which she deliberately spent her money. She never compromised on the quality of her groceries, and drank only good-quality wines.

In his own way, he's lived life with all the intensity he could muster.

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.

I'm not a fast reader. I like to linger over each sentence, enjoying the style. If I don't enjoy the writing, I stop.

There wasn't a cloud in the sky, no wind, and everything was quiet around us - all we could hear were birds chirping in the woods. The war seemed like something in a faraway land that had nothing to do with us. We sang songs as we hiked up the hill, sometimes imitating the birds we heard. Except for the fact that the war was still going on, it was a perfect morning.

When the orbits of these two satellites of ours happened to cross paths, we could be together. Maybe even open our hearts to each other. But that was only for the briefest moment. In the next instant we'd be in absolute solitude. Until we burned up and became nothing.

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.

They put up with such strenuous training, and where did their thoughts, their hopes and dreams, disappear to? When people pass away, do their thoughts just vanish?

I closed my own jazz bar so I could be a man who can write novels as I like. I was pleased about that. This pleasure was connected to the pleasure of writing.

One last word of advice, though, Mr. Okada, though you may not want to hear this. There are things in this world it is better not to know about. Of course, those are the very things that people most want to know about. It's strange.

The answer is dreams. Dreaming on and on. Entering the world of dreams and never coming out. Living in dreams for the rest of time.

No truth can cure the sorrow we feel from losing a loved one. No truth, no sincerity, no strength, no kindness can cure that sorrow. All we can do is see it through to the end and learn something from it, but what we learn will be no help in facing the next sorrow that comes to us without warning.

It was a narrow world, a world that was standing still. But the narrower it became, the more it betook of stillness, the more this world that enveloped me seemed to overflow with things and people that could only be called strange. They had been there all the while, it seemed, waiting in the shadows for me to stop moving. And every time the wind-up bird came to my yard to wind its spring, the world descendedmore deeply into chaos.

I think history is collective memories. In writing, I'm using my own memory, and I'm using my collective memory.

And so they parted, she to the east, and he to the west. The test they had agreed upon, however, was utterly unnecessary. They should never have undertaken it, because they really and truly were each other's 100% perfect lovers, and it was a miracle that they had ever met. But it was impossible for them to know this, young as they were. The cold, indifferent waves of fate proceeded to toss them unmercifully.