Haruki Muakami Quotes

(When asked "Was the model for Midori (a character in Norwegian Wood) modeled after your wife?")
I showed your message to my wife. She got mad and yelled: "What would make them think I was the model for Midori?!" She told me to fix the misunderstanding immediately, so that's why I'm writing this reply now. Please stop causing problems in my household. Thank you. ~ Haruki Murakami

Count your blessings ~ Haruki Murakami

Works that have a certain imperfection to them have an appeal for that very reason - or at least they appeal to certain types of people. Just like you're attracted to Soseki's The Miner. There's something in it that draws you in, more than more fully realized novels like Kokoro or Sanshiro. You discover something about that work that tugs at your heart - or maybe we should say the work discovers you. Schubert's Sonata in D Major is sort of the same thing. ~ Haruki Murakami

Our memory is made up of our individual memories and our collective memories. The two are intimately linked. And history is our collective memory. If our collective memory is taken from us - is rewritten - we lose the ability to sustain our true selves. ~ Haruki Murakami

Mountains, according to the angle of view, the season, the time of day, the beholder's frame of mind, or any one thing, can effectively change their appearance. Thus, it is essential to recognize that we can never know more than one side, one small aspect of a mountain. ~ Haruki Murakami

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. ~ Haruki Murakami

From the girl who sat before me now ... surged a fresh and physical life force. She was like a small animal that has popped into the world with the coming of spring. Her eyes moved like an independent organism with joy, laughter, anger, amazement, and despair. I hadn't seen a face so vivid and expressive in ages, and I enjoyed watching it live and move. ~ Haruki Murakami

But at the same time who would ever think, "I'm an unimportant little person, and if I end up just a cog in society's system, gradually worn down until I die, hey - that's okay"? ~ Haruki Murakami

When there's nothing to do, you do nothing slowly and intently. ~ Haruki Murakami

As if to build a fence around the fatal emptiness inside her, she had to create a sunny person that she became. But if you peeled away the ornamental egos that she had built, there was only an abbys of nothingness and the intense thirst that came with it. Though she tried to forget it, the nothingness would visit her periodically - on a lonely rainy afternoon, or at dawn when she woke up from a nightmare. What she needed at such times was to be held by someone, anyone. ~ Haruki Murakami

The way surviving hard winters makes a tree grows stronger, the growth rings inside it tighter ~ Haruki Murakami

Don't you see? You and he might never cross paths again. Of course, a chance meeting could occur, and I hope it happens. I really do, for your sake. But realistically speaking, you have to see there's a huge possibility you'll never be able to meet him again. And even if you do meet, he might already be married to somebody else. He might have two kids. Isn't that so? And in that case, you may have to live the rest of your life alone, never being joined with the one person you love in all the world. Don't you find that scary? ~ Haruki Murakami

Sometimes I think I've got this hard kernel in my heart, and nothing much can get inside it. I doubt if I can really love anybody. ~ Haruki Murakami

I find the act of writing very painful. I can go a whole month without managing a single line, or write three days and nights straight, only to find the whole thing has missed the mark.
At the same time, though, I love writing. Ascribing meaning to life is a piece of cake compared to actually living it. ~ Haruki Murakami

it's even harder to talk about girls who have died young: by dying, they stay young forever. ~ Haruki Murakami

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. ~ Haruki Murakami

I forget my name," the cat said. "I had one, I know I did, but somewhere along the line I didn't need it anymore. So it's slipped my mind. ~ Haruki Murakami

Where the road sloped upward beyond the trees, I sat and looked toward the building where Naoko lived. It was easy to tell which room was hers. All I had to do was find the one window toward the back where a faint light trembled. I focused on that point of light for a long, long time. It made me think of something like the final throb of a soul's dying embers. I wanted to cup my hands over what was left and keep it alive. I went on watching the way Jay Gatsby watched that tiny light on the opposite shore night after night. ~ Haruki Murakami

Is it better, financially, to go to the physics department than the philosophy department?" Tsukuru asked. "When it comes to their graduates not earning anything, they're about even. Unless you win the Nobel Prize or something," Haida said, flashing his usual winning smile. ~ Haruki Murakami

They weren't fact. They were possibility. Nothing more, nothing less, but the force of the possibility was shattering. ~ Haruki Murakami

It doesnt happen very often, but sometimes, before i even realize what's going on, there i am - naked and defenseless and totally confused ~ Haruki Murakami

I had my jazz club and I had enough money. So I didn't have to write for my living. ~ Haruki Murakami

The young man knows that he is irretrievably lost. This is no town of cats, he finally realizes. It is the place where he is meant to be lost. It is another world, which has been prepared especially for him. And never again, for all eternity, will the train stop at this station to take him back to the world he came from. ~ Haruki Murakami

But decent motives don't always produce decent results. And the body is not the only target of rape. Violence does not always take visible form, and not all wounds gush blood." ~the dowager ~ Haruki Murakami

Thinking about spaghetti that boils eternally but is never done is a sad, sad thing. ~ Haruki Murakami

As always, we sit on the narrow steps that lead from the Old Bridge down to the sandbar. A pale silver moon trembles on the face of the water. A wooden boat lashed to a post modulates the sound of the current. Sitting with her, I feel her warm against my arm. ~ Haruki Murakami

There are some things in this world that can be done over, and some that can't. And time passing is one thing that can't be redone. Come this far, and you can't go back. ~ Haruki Murakami

In our broad sweep, the city looks like a single gigantic creature - or more like a single collective entity created by many intertwining organism. Countless arteries stretch to the ends of its elusive body, circulating a continuous supply of fresh blood cells, sending out new data and collecting the old, sending out new consumables and collecting the old, sending out new contradictions and collecting the old. To the rhythm of its pulsing, all parts of the body flicker and flare up and squirm. Midnight is approaching, and while the peak of activity has passed, the basal metabolism that maintains life continues undiminished, producing the basso continuo of the city's moan, a monotonous sound that neither rises nor falls but is pregnant with foreboding. ~ Haruki Murakami

I knew I'd be all right, I'd be safe with you there. ~ Haruki Murakami

I'm not a fast thinker, but once I am interested in something, I am doing it for many years. ~ Haruki Murakami

Find me now. Before someone else does. ~ Haruki Murakami

It is not that the meaning cannot be explained. But there are certain meanings that are lost forever the moment they are explained in words. ~ Haruki Murakami

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. 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. [...]
Narrow minds devoid of imagination. Intolerance, theories cut off from reality, empty terminology, usurped ideals, inflexible systems. Those are the things that really frighten me. What I absolutely fear and loathe. Of course it's important to know what's right and what's wrong. Individual errors in judgment can usually be corrected. As long as you have the courage to admit mistakes, things can be turned around. But intolerant, narrow minds with no imagination are like parasites that transform the host, change form, and continue to thrive. ~ Haruki Murakami

Anyway, I forgot all about him once I graduated. So quickly and easily, it was weird. What was it about him that had made the seventeen-year-old me fall so hard? Try as I might, I couldn't remember. Life is strange, isn't it? You can be totally entranced by something one minute, be willing to sacrifice everything to make it yours, but then a little time passes, or your perspective changes a bit, and all of a sudden you're shocked at how its glow has faded. What was I looking at? you wonder. So that's the story of my 'breaking-and-entering' period. ~ Haruki Murakami

I was feeling lonely without her, but the fact that I could feel lonely at all was consolation. Loneliness wasn't such a bad feeling. It was like the stillness of the pin oak after the little birds had flown off. ~ Haruki Murakami

He was a tiny piece in a gigantic puzzle. But instead of having one fixed shape, his shape kept changing. And so - of course - he couldn't fit anywhere. As he tried to sort out where he belonged, he was also given a set amount of time to gather the scattered pages of the timpani section of a score. ~ Haruki Murakami