Haruki Murakami Quotes

Aren't you a little young to be, like, the voice of wisdom or something?

If you really want to know something, you have to be willing to pay the price.

The gears of life had moved ahead a notch with a loud ker-chunk, and Junpei knew that they would never turn back again.

It is as evil as we are positive...the more desperately we try to be good and wonderful and perfect, the more the Shadow develops a definite will to be black and evil and destructive... The fact is that if one tries beyond one's capacity to be perfect, the Shadow descends to hell and becomes the devil.

People think of all kinds of things at three in the morning. We all do. That's why we each have to figure out our own way of fighting it off.

The morning is not my time. Darkness is my friend. A vacuum is my breath. I must be saying goodbye soon.

The darkness behind my closed eyelids was like the cloud-covered sky, but the gray was somewhat deeper. Every few minutes, someone would come and paint over the gray with a different-textured gray - one with a touch of gold or green or red. I was impressed with the variety of grays that existed. Human beings were so strange. All you had to do was sit still for ten minutes, and you could see this amazing variety of grays.

Just speak your mind honestly. That's the best thing. It may hurt a little sometimes, and someone may get upset, but in the long run, it's for the best.

When the phone rang I was in the kitchen, boiling a potful of spaghetti and whistling along with an FM broadcast of the overture to Rossini's 'The Thieving Magpie,' which has to be the perfect music for cooking pasta.

That's what the world is , after all: an endless battle of contrasting memories.

I'm struck by how pitiful and pointless this little container called me is, what a lame, shabby being I am. I feel like everything I've ever done in life has been a total waste.

After the small woman had left, Ushikawa stared at the door for the longest time. She had shut the door behind her, but there was still a strong sense of her in the room. Maybe in exchange for leaving a trace of herself behind, she had taken away a part of Ushikawa's soul. He could feel that new void within his chest. Why did this happen? he wondered, finding it odd. And what could it possibly mean?

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

Writing from memory like this, I often feel a pang of dread. What if I've forgotten the most important thing? What if somewhere inside me there is a dark limbo where all the the truly important memories are heaped and slowly turning into mud?

I gazed up at the sky. I was in a tiny boat, on a vast ocean. No wind, no waves, just me floating there. Adrift on the open sea..
..A tiny boat cut loose from the fiction of the ship.

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

A person's life may be a lonely thing by nature, but it is not isolated. To that life other lives are linked.

Thinking back ( ... ) all that comes to mind for me is a swamp - a deep, sticky bog that feels as if it's going to suck off my shoe each time I take a step. I walk through the mud, exhausted. In front of me, behind me, I can see nothing but the endless darkness of a swamp.

My imagination is a kind of animal. So what I do is keep it alive

All he knew was that he was now a human whose name was Gregor Samsa.

Many long months and years seemed to have passed since the room had made up its mind never to welcome any visitors.

Reality came first, and the principles and logic followed.

Phones ringing in the middle
of the night always sound harsh and grating, like some savage metal tool out to
destroy the world. I felt it was my duty, as a member of the human race, to put a
stop to it

When I was fifteen, all I wanted was to go off to some other world, a place beyond anybody's reach. A place beyond the flow of time.
- But there's no place like that in this world.
- Exactly. Which is why I'm living here, in this world where things are continually damaged, where the heart is fickle, where time flows past without a break.

I'm scared," she said. "These days I feel like a snail without a shell." "I'm scared too," I said. "I feel like a frog without any webs." She looked up and smiled. Wordlessly we walked over to a shaded part of the building and held each other and kissed, a shell-less snail and a webless frog.

When the time comes, everybody's got to end up where they belong. Only me, I didn't have a place to call my own. It's like musical chairs.

Habit, in fact, was what propelled his life forward. Though he no longer believed in a perfect community, nor felt the warmth of chemistry between people.

Reading was like an addiction; I read while I ate, on the train, in bed until late at night, in school, where I'd keep the book hidden so I could read during class. Before long I bought a small stereo and spent all my time in my room, listening to jazz records. But I had almost no desire to talk to anyone about the experience I gained through books and music. I felt happy just being me and no one else. In that sense I could be called a stack-up loner.

I am me and not me.

No Good News in This Chapter

No,' I said, 'I don't want to go anywhere alone. I'll fall apart if I don't have you. I need you. Please, don't leave me alone.

Let a bright light shine in and melt the coldness in your heart. That's what being tough is all about.

A sense of calm envelopes me, a feeling close to rapture. Swimming is one of the best things in my life. It has never solved any problems, but it has done no harm, and nothing has ever ruined it for me. Swimming.

It seemed to me that this world has a serious shortage of both logic and kindness.

I'm the lonely voyager standing on deck, and she's the sea.

Only people who've been discriminated against can really know how much it hurts. Each person feels the pain in his own way, each has his own scars. So I think I'm as concerned about fairness and justice as anybody. But what disgusts me even more are people who have no imagination. The kind T. S. Eliot calls hollow men. People who fill up that lack of imagination with heartless bits of straw, not even aware of what they're doing. Callous people who throw a lot of empty words at you, trying to force you to do what you don't want to. Like that lovely pair we just met." He sighs and twirls the long slender pencil in his hand. "Gays, lesbians, straights, feminists, fascist pigs, communists, Hare Krishnas-- none of them bother me. I don't care what banner they raise. But what I can't stand are hollow people. When I'm with them I just can't bear it, and wind up saying things I shouldn't. With those women--I should've just let it slide, or else called Miss Saeki and let her handle it. She would have given them a smile and smoothed things over. But I just can't do "do that. I say things I shouldn't, do things I shouldn't do. I can't control myself. That's one of my weak points. Do you know why that's a weak point of mine?"
"'Cause if you take every single person who lacks much imagination seriously, there's no end to it," I say.

There are things in his world it is better not to know about. Of course, those are the very things that people most want to know about.

Cell phones are so convenient that they're an inconvenience.

Picture a bird perched on a thin branch, she [Miss Saeki] says. 'The branch sways in the wind, and each time this happens the bird's field of vision shifts. You know what I mean?'
I nod.
'When that happens, how do you think the bird adjusts?'
I shake my head. 'I don't know.'
'It bobs its head up and down, making up for the sway of the branch. Take a good look at birds the next time it's windy. I spend a lot of time looking out that window. Don't you think that kind of life would be tiresome? Always shifting your head every time the branch you're on sways?'
'I do.'
'Birds are used to it. It comes naturally to them. They don't have to think about it, they just do it. So it's not as tiring as we imagine. But I'm a human being, not a bird, so sometimes it does get tiring.

I could hear hundreds of elves sweeping out my head with their tiny brooms. They kept sweeping and sweeping. It never occurred to any of them to use a dustpan.

People want to be bowled over by something special. Nine times out of ten you might strike out, but that tenth time, that peak experience, is what people want. That's what can move the world. That's art.

Never trust a man who carries a handkerchief, I always say. One of many prejudicial rules of thumb.

When all around is dark, there is nothing to do but to wait until the eye accustomed to the dark

Every single day, each time I see her face, see her, it's utterly precious.

In his or her own way, everyone I saw before me looked happy. Whether they were really happy or just looked it, I couldn't tell. But they did look happy on this pleasant early afternoon in late September, and because of that I felt a kind of loneliness new to me, as if I were the only one here who was not truly part of the scene.

Waves of consciousness roll in, roll out, leave some writing, and just as quickly new waves roll in and erase it. I try to quickly read what's written there, but it's hard.

No matter what they wish for, no matter how far they go, people can never be anything but themselves. That's all.

No mistake about it. Ice is cold; roses are red; I'm in love. And this love is about to carry me off somewhere. The current's too overpowering; I don't have any choice. It may very well be a special place, some place I've never seen before. Danger may be lurking there, something that may end up wounding me deeply, fatally. I might end up losing everything. But there's no turning back. I can only go with the flow. Even if it means I'll be burned up, gone forever.

Aomame gave him a perfunctory smile. I don't give a shit about your business, mister, she thought, I just happen to like the shape of your head.

As with marathon runs and lengths of toilet paper, there had to be standards to measure up to.

Why do people have to be this lonely? What's the point of it all? Millions of people in this world, all of them yearning, looking to others to satisfy them, yet isolating themselves. Why? Was the earth put here just to nourish human loneliness?

Ask whatever questions you want, but remember, I may not answer.

I'm dying of thirst but lack the strength to even drink water anymore.

All those different names, dates, deaths, each backed with a past life, were like shrubs in an arboretum, spaced out equidistantly as far as the eye could
see. No gently swaying breezes for them, no fragrances, no touch of a hand reaching through the darkness. They who seemed like trees lost to time. They to whom no thoughts occurred, nor would ever have words to get them across. They'd left all that to those who still had some living to do.

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.

A short story I have written long ago would barge into my house in the middle of the night, shake me awake and shout, 'Hey,this is no time for sleeping! You can't forget me, there's still more to write!' Impelled by that voice, I would find myself writing a novel. In this sense, too, my short stories and novels connect inside me in a very natural, organic way.

The truth is a symbol, and symbols are the truth. It is best to grasp symbols the way they are. There's no logic or facts, no pig's belly button or ant's balls. When people try to use a method other than the truth to follow along the path of understanding, it is like trying to use a sieve to hold water.

Letters are just pieces of paper," I said. "Burn them, and what stays in your heart will stay; keep them, and what vanishes will vanish.

All right, then, I thought: here I am in the bottom of a well.

The strange sense of being disassembled

Seeing her now, the true weight of sixteen years of time struck him with a sudden intensity. There are some things, he concluded, that can only be expressed through the shape of a woman's form.

The two of them on top of the freezing slide, wordlessly holding hands. Once again they were a ten-year-old boy and girl. A lonely boy, and a lonely girl. A classroom, just after school let out, at the beginning of winter. They had neither the power nor the knowledge to know what they should offer to each other, what they should be seeking. They had never, ever, been truly loved, or truly loved someone else. They had never held anyone, never been held. They had not idea, either, where this action would take them. What they entered then was a doorless room. They couldn't get out, nor could anyone else come in. The two of them didn't know it at the time, but this was the only truly complete place in the entire world. Totally isolated, yet the one place not tainted with loneliness.

Sheepish butlers' surgical bottle battles"
a tongue twister p.364

True, he was tremendously boring, which really got on her nerves, but that was not a crime deserving of death. Probably.

I nodded and sipped my beer. "That's about the size of it," I said. That was about the size of it.

Are you the sort of boy who finds fault with every little thing, however trivial?

When you prick a person with a needle, red blood comes out - that's the real world,

All imperfections are forced upon the imperfect, so the 'perfect' can live content and oblivious.

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.

When the sun went down, and touches of blue filtered into the fading afterglow, an orange lamp would light up in the knob of the bell and slowly begin to revolve. The beacon always pinpointed the onset of nightfall exactly. Against the most gorgeous sunsets or in dim drizzling mist, the beacon was ever true to its appointed moment: that precise instant in the alchemy of light and dark when darkness tipped the scales.

To be honest, I almost never use the dictionary. I just don't like dictionaries. I don't like the way they look, and I don't like what they say inside.

Where there's an entrance, there's got to be an exit. Most things work that way.

Civilization means transmission, he said. Whatever can't be expressed might as well not exist. Get the picture? It'd be good for exactly zero.

If a person would just make the effort, there's something to be learned from everything. From even the most ordinary, commonplace things, there's always something you can learn.

Nestled next to me, she nodded. "I'm fine. As long as I take the medicine. So don't worry." She leaned her head back against my shoulder. "But don't ask me anything, okay? Why that happened."
"Understood. No questions," I said.
"Thank you very much for today," she said.
"What part of today?"
"For taking me to the river. For giving me water from your mouth. For putting up with me."
I looked at her. Her lips were right in front of me. The lips I had kissed as I gave her water. And once more those lips seemed to be seeking me. Slightly parted, with her beautiful white teeth barely visible. I could still feel her soft tongue, which I'd touched slightly as I gave her water. I found it hard to breathe, and I couldn't think. My body burned. She wants me, I thought. And I want her.

Time goes by so damn fast.

He longed for her more than he could say. It was a wonderful thing to be able to truly want someone like this –the feeling was so real, so overpowering. He hadn't felt this way in ages. Maybe he never had before. Not that everything about it was wonderful: his chest ached, he found it hard to breathe, and a fear, a dark oscillation, had hold of him. But now even that kind of ache had become an important part of the affection he felt. He didn't want to let that feeling slip from his grasp. Once lost, he might never happen across that warmth again. If he had to lose it, he would rather lose himself.

When people photograph an object, they often put a pack of cigarettes next to it to give the viewer a sense of the object's actual size, but the pack of cigarettes next to the images in my memory expanded and contracted, depending on my mood at the time. Like the objects and events in constant flux, or perhaps in opposition to them, what should have been a fixed yardstick inside the framework of my memory seemed instead to be in perpetual motion.

The room was utterly silent. Now there is the silence you encounter on entering a grand manor. And there is the silence that comes of too few people in too big a space. But this was a different quality of silence altogether. A ponderous, oppressive silence. A silence reminiscent, though it took me a while to put my finger on it, of the silence that hangs around a terminal patient. A silence pregnant with the presentiment of death. The air faintly musty and ominous.

That's what it felt like. Passed through is the only way I can express it. Like my body had passed clean through a stone wall. At what exact point I felt like I'd made it through, I can't recall, but suddenly I noticed I was already on the other side. I was convinced I'd made it through. I don't know about the logic or the process or the method involved - I was simply convinced of the reality that I'd passed through.
After that, I didn't have to think anymore. Or, more precisely, there wasn't the need to try to consciously think about not thinking. All I had to do was go with the flow and I'd get there automatically. If I gave myself up to it, some sort of power would naturally push me forward.

I wounded you deeply, all because it suited the situation as I saw it. Even though I loved you so much.

Because, Mr.. Katagiri, Tokyo can only be saved by a person like you. And it's for people like you that I am trying to save Tokyo.

Life is frightening.

If you miss the bus, miss the train, you'd be left behind. So everyone says, let's get on the train, let's get on the bus and go faster and get rich ... I just didn't like that kind of lifestyle. I love to read books, to listen to music.

If you don't know what you're looking for, it's not easy to look for it." Erika

Ushikawa always saw himself as a realist, and he actually was. Metaphysical speculation wasn't his thing. If something really existed you, had to except it as a reality whether or not it made sense or was logical. That was his basic way of thinking. Principles Logic didn't give birth to a reality. Reality came first and the principles of logic followed. So, he decided, he would have to begin by accepting this reality: that there were two moons in the sky.

I myself, as I'm writing, don't know who did it. The readers and I are on the same ground. When I start to write a story, I don't know the conclusion at all and I don't know what's going to happen next. If there is a murder case as the first thing, I don't know who the killer is. I write the book because I would like to find out. If I know who the killer is, there's no purpose to writing the story.

I'm always tripped up by the eternal who am I?

Someday you will murder your father and be with your mother, he said." Once I've spoken this, put this thought into concrete words, a hollow feeling grabs hold of me. And inside that hollow, my heart pounds out a vacant, metallic rhythm. Expression unchanged, Oshima gazes at me for a long time. "So he said that someday you would kill your father with your own hands, that you would sleep with your mother." I nod a few more times. "The same prophecy made about Oedipus. Though of course you knew that." I nod. "But that's not all. There's an extra ingredient he threw into the mix. I have a sister six years older than me, and my father said I would sleep with her, too." "Your father actually said this to you?" "Yeah. I was still in elementary school then, and didn't know what he meant by 'be with.' It was only a few years later that I caught on." Oshima doesn't say anything. "My father told me there was nothing I could do to escape this fate. That prophecy is like a timing device buried inside my genes, and nothing can ever change it. I will kill my father and be with my mother and sister.

As long as I'm alive, I can think what I want, when I want, any way I want, as much as I want, and nobody can tell me any different

It was such a radiant smile, without a trace of shadow, that I couldn't help smiling myself.

She was a keen observer, a precise user of language, sharp-tongued and funny. She could stir your emotions. Yes, really, that's what she was so good at - stirring people's emotions, moving you. And she knew she had this power ... I only realized later. At the time, I had no idea what she was doing to me.

Speaking frankly and speaking the truth are two different things entirely. Honesty is to truth as prow is to stern. Honesty appears first and truth appears last.

With each passing moment I'm becoming part of the past. There is no future for me, just the past steadily accumulating.

I try not to think about anything special while running. As a matter of fact, I usually run with my mind empty. However, when I run empty-minded, something naturally and abruptly crawls in sometime. That might become an idea that can help me with my writing.

It was really real, what I felt, but if I try to explain it in words, then it sort of starts to slip away.

What I mean to say is that in a highly exceptional reality [ ... ] the non-exceptional can, for convenience sake, be written off as paradoxically exceptional.

If you want to talk about something new, you have to make up a new kind of language.

I don't know, I don't feel right unless I've got the sea and mountains nearby. People are mostly a product of where they were born and raised. How you think and feel's always linked to the lay of the land, the temperature. The prevailing winds, even.

What I mean to say is probably something like this: any single human being, no matter what kind of person he or she may be, is all caught up in the tentacles of this animal like a giant octopus, and is getting sucked into the darkness. You can put any kind of spin on it you like, but you end up with the same unbearable spectacle.