Haruki Murakami Quotes

If, as the dowager had said, we are nothing but gene carriers, why do so many of us have to lead such strangely shaped lives? Wouldn't our genetic purpose-to transmit DNA-be served just as well if we lived simple lives, not bothering our heads with a lot of extraneous thoughts, devoted entirely to preserving life and procreating? Did it benefit the genes in any way for us to lead such intricately warped, even bizarre, lives?

You're afraid of imagination and even more afraid of dreams. Afraid of the resposibility that begins in dreams. But you have to sleep and dreams are a part of sleep. When you're awake you can suppress imagination but you can't supress dreams.

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.

That's gotta be one of the principles behind reality. Accepting things that are hard to comprehend, and leaving them that way.

I often recall these words when I am writing, and I think to myself, “It’s true. There aren’t any new words. Our job is to give new meanings and special overtones to absolutely ordinary words.” I find the thought reassuring. It means that vast, unknown stretches still lie before us, fertile territories just waiting for us to cultivate them.

Please think of me like an endangered species and just observe me quietly from far away. If you try to talk to me or touch me casually, I may get intimidated and bite you. So please be careful.

Here, too, a brand-new day is beginning. It could be a day like all the others, or it could be a day remarkable enough in many ways to remain in the memory. In either case, for now, for most people, it is a blank sheet of paper.

That's evolution. Evolution's always hard. Hard and bleak. No such thing as happy evolution

Sometimes I find it too hot to run, and sometimes too cold. Or too cloudy. But I still go running. I know that if I didn't go running, I wouldn't go the next day either. It's not in human nature to take unnecessary burdens upon oneself, so one's body soon becomes disaccustomed. It mustn't do that. It's the same with writing. I write every day so that my mind doesn't become disaccustomed.

What we seek is some kind of compensation for what we put up with.

But metaphors help eliminate what separates you and me.

I was twenty-one at the time, about to turn twenty-two. No prospect of graduating soon, and yet no reason to quit school. Caught in the most curiously depressing circumstances. For months I'd been stuck, unable to take one step in any new direction. The world kept moving on; I alone was at a standstill. In the autumn, everything took on a desolate cast, the colors swiftly fading before my eyes. The sunlight, the smell of the grass, the faintest patter of rain, everything got on my nerves.

I can never say what I want to say, it's been like this for a while now. I try to say something but all I get are wrong words - the wrong words or the exact opposite words from what I mean. I try to correct myself, and that only makes it worse. I lose track of what I was trying to say to begin with. It's like I'm split in two and playing tag with myself. One half is chasing this big, fat post. The other me has the right words, but this can't catch her.

Judging the mistakes of strangers is an easy thing to do - and it feels pretty good.

In a place far away from anyone or anywhere, I drifted off for a moment.

I've been lonely for so long. And I've been hurt so deeply. If only I could have met you again a long time ago, then I wouldn't have had to take all these detours to get here.' Tengo shook his head. 'I don't think so. This way is just fine. This is exactly the right time. For both of us. [...] We needed that much time.... to understand how lonely we really were.

As long as you have the courage to admit mistakes, things can be turned around.

Most near-future fictions are boring. It's always dark and always raining, and people are so unhappy.

I don't know how many good books I still have in me; I hope there are another four or five.

A certain kind of shittiness, a certain kind of stagnation, a certain kind of darkness, goes on propagating itself by its own power in its own self-contained cycle. And once it passes a certain point, no one can stop it-even if the person himself wants to stop it.

You can see a person's whole life in the cancer they get.

Listen. I may not be much, but I'm all I've got. Maybe you need a magnifying glass to find my face in my high school graduation photo. Maybe I haven't got any family or friends. Yes, yes, I know all that. But, strange as it might seem, I'm not entirely dissatisfied with life... I feel pretty much at home with what I am. I don't want to go anywhere. I don't want any unicorns behind fences.

People leave strange little memories of themselves behind when they die.

When people tell a lie about something, they have to make up a bunch of lies to go with the first one. ‘Mythomania’ is the word for it.

Why do I act like this, agreeing when I really disagree, letting people force me to do things I don't want to do?

Nights without work I spend with whisky and books.

Music always stimulates my imagination. When I'm writing I usually have some Baroque music on low in the background chamber music by Bach, Telemann, and the like.

I've run the Boston Marathon 6 times before. I think the best aspects of the marathon are the beautiful changes of the scenery along the route and the warmth of the people's support. I feel happier every time I enter this marathon.

I can be hurt, you know. I can get as exhausted as anybody else. I can feel so bad I want to cry, too.

She's letting out her feelings. The scary thing is not being able to do that. When your feelings build up and harden and die inside, then you're in big trouble.

Every day I go to my study and sit at my desk and put the computer on. At that moment, I have to open the door. It's a big, heavy door. You have to go into the Other Room. Metaphorically, of course. And you have to come back to this side of the room. And you have to shut the door.

You have to make an effort to always look at the good side, always think about the good things. Then you've got nothing to be afraid of. If something bad comes up, you do more thinking at that point.

There had to be something wrong with my life. I should have been born a Yugoslavian shepherd who looked up at the Big Dipper every night.

Before I became a writer, I was running a jazz bar in the center of Tokyo, which means that I worked in filthy air all the time late into the night. I was very excited when I started making a living out of my writing, and I decided, 'I will live in nothing but an absolutely healthy way.'

It was as if I were writing letters to hold together the pieces of my crumbling life.

Each of us possesses a tangible living soul. The system has no such thing. We must not allow the system to exploit us.

The pure present is an ungraspable advance of the past devouring the future. In truth, all sensation is already memory.

Lost opportunities, lost possibilities, feelings we can never get back. That's part of what it means to be alive. But inside our heads - at least that's where I imagine it - there's a little room where we store those memories. A room like the stacks in this library. And to understand the workings of our own heart we have to keep on making new reference cards. We have to dust things off every once in awhile, let in fresh air, change the water in the flower vases. In other words, you'll live forever in your own private library.

I wonder how it turns out that we all lead such different lives. Take you and your sister, for example. You're born to the same parents, you grow up in the same household, you're both girls. How do you end up with such wildly different personalities?...One puts on a bikini like little semaphore flags and lies by the pool looking sexy, and the other puts on her school bathing suit and swims her heart out like a dolphin.

Even if we could turn back, we'd probably never end up where we started.

Like it or not, it's the society we live in. Even the standard of right and wrong has been subdivided, made sophisticated. Within good, there's fashionable good and unfashionable good, and ditto for bad. Within fashionable good, there's formal and then there's casual; there's hip, there's cool, there's trendy, there's snobbish. Mix 'n' match.

Learning another language is like becoming another person.

[...] Shimamoto had her own little world within her. A world that was for her alone, one I could not enter.

I have a million things to talk to you about. All I want in this world is you. I want to see you and talk. I want the two of us to begin everything from the beginning.

"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."

If I used being busy as an excuse not to run, I'd never run again. I have only a few reasons to keep on running, and a truckload of them to quit.

Isn't life strange? There are people who have so many leftover clothes they can't stuff them all in their wardrobe. And then there are people like me, whose socks never match.

My point is: in this whole wide world the only person you can depend on is you.