Haruki Murakami Quotes

I was thirty-seven then, strapped in my seat as the huge 747 plunged through dense cloud cover on approach to the Hamburg airport.

You’re really cute, Midori,” I corrected myself. “What do you mean really cute?” “So cute the mountains crumble and the oceans dry up.

So I'm not crazy after all! I thought it looked good myself once I cut it all off. Not one guy likes it, though. They all tell me I look like a first grader or a concentration camp survivor. What's this thing that guys have for girls with long hair? Fascists, the whole bunch of them! Why do guys all think girls with long hair are the classiest, the sweetest, the most feminine? I mean, I myself know at least two hundred and fifty unclassy girls with long hair. Really.

A girl doesn't always want to go out, you know, Mr. Wind-Up Bird. Sometimes she feels like being nasty--like, if the guy's gonna wait, let him really wait.

Something inside me had dropped away, and nothing came in to fill the cavern.

Fairness is a concept that holds only in limited situations. Yet we want the concept to extend to everything, in and out of phase. From snails to hardware stores to married life. Maybe no one finds it, or even misses it, but fairness is like love. What is given has nothing to do with what we seek.

There has to be pain. That's the rule.

Being active every day makes it easier to hear that inner voice.

Hey, what is it with you? Why are you so spaced out? You still haven't answered me." I probably still haven't completely adapted to the world," I said after giving it some thought. "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." Midori rested an elbow on the bar and looked at me. "There was something like that in a Jim Morrison song, I'm pretty sure." People are strange when you're a stranger.

Time passes slowly. Nobody says a word, everyone lost in quiet reading. One person sits at a desk jotting down notes, but the rest are sitting there silently, not moving, totally absorbed. Just like me.

Everytime you see a flood like that on the news you tell yourself: That's it. That's my heart.

You can have tons of talent, but it won't necessarily keep you fed. If you have sharp instincts, through, you'll never go hungry.

If you're going to while away the years, it's far better to live them with clear goals and fully alive then in a fog, and I believe #‎ running helps you to do that. Exerting yourself to the fullest within your individual limits: that's the essence of running, and a metaphor for life.

The best way to think about reality, I had decided, was to get as far away from it as possible.

In traveling, a companion, in life, compassion.

You’re optimistic one moment, only to be racked the next by the certainty that it will all fall to pieces. And in the end it does.

I wondered if she was trying to convey something to me, something she could not put into words - something prior to words that she could not grasp within herself and which therefore had no hope of ever turning into words.

Like most novelists, I like to do exactly the opposite of what I'm told. It's in my nature as a novelist. Novelists can't trust anything they haven't seen with their own eyes or touched with their own hands.

If you think God’s there, He is. If you don’t, He isn’t. And if that’s what God’s like, I wouldn’t worry about it.

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.

I closed my eyes and tried to sleep. But it was not until much later that I was able to get any real sleep. In a place far away from anyone or anywhere, I drifted off for a moment.

A friend to kill time is a friend sublime.

So the fact that I’m me and no one else is one of my greatest assets. Emotional hurt is the price a person has to pay in order to be independent.

Everybody has some one thing they do not want to lose," began the man. "You included. And we are professionals at finding out that very thing. Humans by necessity must have a midway point between their desires and their pride. Just as all objects must have a center of gravity. This is something we can pinpoint. Only when it is gone do people realize it even existed.

It feels like everything's been decided in advance that I'm following a path somebody else has already mapped out for me. It doesn't matter how much I think things over, how much effort I put into it. In fact, the harder I try, the more I lose my sense of who I am. It's like my identity's an orbit that I've strayed far away from, and that really hurts. But more than that, it scares me. Just thinking about it makes me flinch.

Like you're riding a train at night across some vast plain, and you catch a glimpse of a tiny light in a window of a farmhouse. In an instant it's sucked back into the darkness behind and vanishes. But if you close your eyes, that point of light stays with you, just barely for a few moments.

I've always done whatever I felt like doing in life. People may try to stop me, and convince me I'm wrong, but I won't change.

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.

The whole terrible fight occured in the area of imagination. That is the precise location of our battlefield. It is there, that we experience our victories and defeats.

She was hearing everything that went on in his heart, like a person who can trace a map with his fingertip and conjure up vivid, living scenery.

Tell me how you could say such a thing, she said, staring down at the ground beneath her feet. You're not telling me anything I don't know already. 'Relax your body, and the rest of you will lighten up.' What's the point of saying that to me? If I relaxed my body now, I'd fall apart. I've always lived like this, and it's the only way I know how to go on living. If I relaxed for a second, I'd never find my way back. I'd go to pieces, and the pieces would be blown away. Why can't you see that? How can you talk about watching over me if you can't see that?

If there's any guy crazy enough to attack me, I'm going to show him the end of the world -- close up. I'm going to let him see the kingdom come with his own eyes. I'm going to send him straight to the southern hemisphere and let the ashes of death rain all over him and the kangaroos and the wallabies.

Start making excuses and there's no end to it. I can't live that kind of life.

Things like that happen all the time in this great big world of ours. It's like taking a boat out on a beautiful lake on a beautiful day and thinking both the sky and the lake are beautiful. So stop eating yourself up alive. Things will go where they're supposed to go if you just let them take their natural course.

When you are used to the kind of life -of never getting anything you want- you stop knowing what it is you want.

It is my huge pleasure that my novels are translated into languages that are read among small numbers of people.

Anyone who falls in love is searching for the missing pieces of themselves.

Maybe the star doesnt even exist any more.Yet sometimes that light seems more real to me than anything.

No matter how far you travel, you can never get away from yourself.

The light of morning decomposes everything.

I am here, alone, at the end of the world. I reach out and touch nothing.”.

The most important thing we learn at school is the fact that the most important things can't be learned at school.

Sometimes when I'm with you, I remember things I lost when I was your age. Like I remember the sound of the rain and the smell of the wind.

I can't build a simple shelf. I have no idea how to change an oil filter on a car. I can't even stick a stamp on an envelope straight. And I'm always dialling the wrong number. But I have come up with a few original cocktails that people seem to like.

Whether in music or in fiction, the most basic thing is rhythm. Your style needs to have good, natural, steady rhythm, or people won't keep reading your work.

When I am writing, I do not distinguish between the natural and supernatural. Everything seems real. That is my world, you could say.

The dead will always be dead, but we have to go on living.

I'm a writer. I don't support any war. That's my principle.