Quotes by Haruki Murakami

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

I wonder what ants do on rainy days.

All you can do is go on living alone down there in the darkness.

The room is dark, but our eyes gradually adjust to the darkness.

It is sometimes necessary for each person. Fill up with delicious food, get drunk, sing loudly and chat frivolously.

The power to concentrate was the most important thing. Living without this power would be like opening one's eyes without seeing anything.

We keep moving. And as we do, the things around us, well, they disappear.

I don't know, there's something about you. Say there's an hourglass, the sand's about to run out. Someone like you can always be counted on to turn the thing over.

I am worrying about my country. I feel I have a responsibility as a novelist to do something.

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

The past became a long, razor-sharp skewer that stabbed right through his heart. Silent silver pain shot through him, transforming his spine to a pillar of ice. The pain remained, unabated. He held his breath, shut his eyes tight, enduring the agony.

Fleas are like a bad habit--awfully hard to get rid of once you get them.

finally he was just another ant, working and working until he died without meaning.

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.

What she most wanted was to blend in with her background by changing color and shape, to remain inconspicuous and not easily remembered. This was how she had protected herself since childhood.

For a ten-year-old boy and a ten-year-old girl to become good friends was not easy under any circumstances. Indeed, it might be one of the most difficult accomplishments in the world.

He did not have the sort of looks suited for stakeouts or tailing people. As much as he might try to lose himself in a crowd, he was as inconspicuous as a centipede in a coup of yogurt.

You're wrong. The mind is not like raindrops. It does not fall from the skies, it does not lose itself among other things. If you believe in me at all, then believe this: I promise you I will find it. Everything depends on this.
I believe you, she whispers after a moment. Please find my mind.

Are there any capitalist cats? Nakata asked.

Slowly like a movie fade out, the real world evaporates. I'm alone, inside the world of the story. My favorite feeling in the world.

Every person should decide for himself how happy, or unhappy, our society might be.

It was as if my whole life revolved around trying to judge the appropriate point in a conversation to say goodbye.

He decided not to ask for details. Better to avoid exposing his ignorance even further.

I can't imagine how American readers will react to a novel, but if the story is appealing it doesn't matter much if you don't catch all the detail. I'm not too familiar with the geography of nineteenth century London, for instance, but I still enjoy reading Dickens.

When I see a dictionary on my desk I feel like I'm looking at some strange dog leaving a twisty piece of poop on our lawn out back.

I often dream about the Dolphin Hotel.

Only where there is disillusionment and depression and sorrow does happiness arise; without the despair of loss, there is no hope.

When you fall in love, the natural thing to do is give yourself to it. That's what I think. It's just a form of sincerity.

Things change everyday. With each new dawn, it is not the same world as before. And you're not the same person you were either.

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

My biggest fault is that the faults I was born with grow bigger each year.

Everybody feels safe belonging not to the excluded minority but to the excluding majority. You think, Oh, I'm glad that's not me. It's basically the same in all periods in all societies. If you belong to the majority, you can avoid thinking about lots of troubling things.

For me, it was a lonely season. Whenever I got home and took off my clothes, I felt as if any second my bones would burst through my skin. Like some unknown force inside me had taken a wrong turn somewhere, and was leading me off in some strange direction to another world.

Rousseau defined civilizations as when people build fences.

If you have to choose between something that has form and something that doesn't, go for the one without form. That's my rule.

Reaching the finish line, never walking, and enjoying the race. These three, in this order, are my goals.

Our hands were clasped together for ten seconds at most, but to me it felt more like thirty minutes. When she let go of my hand, I was suddenly lost.

The faintest gleam of their lost memories glimmered for the briefest moment in their hearts.

Now that you've said hello, I'm afraid we move right into farewells. Hello, goodbye. Like flowers scattered in a storm, man's life is one long farewell, as they say.

Humans by necessity must have a midway point between their desires and their pride. Just as all objects must have a center of gravity.

Where there's guts, there's curiosity, and where there's curiosity, there's guts.

You can keep as quiet as you like, but one of these days somebody is going to find you.

If you listen carefully, you can hear these things. If you look carefully, you'll see what you're after.

Ice contains no future, just the past, sealed away. As if they're alive, everything in the world is sealed up inside, clear and distinct. Ice can preserve all kinds of things that way -- cleanly, clearly. That's the essence of ice, the role it plays.

Perhaps normal imperfect human beings simply preferred the company of other normal imperfect human beings.

I was always hungry for love. Just once, I wanted to know what it was like to get my fill of it -- to be fed so much love I couldn't take it any more. Just once.

I've been clinging to this world like a discarded shell of an insect stuck to a branch, about to be blown off forever by a gust of wind.

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

I don't know what I want. And, if that's the case, as my ex-wife said, I'd only hurt people.

You are caught between all that was and all that must be. You feel lost. Mark my words: as soon as the bones mend, you will forget about the fracture.

Smart presidents usually became the target of assassins so people with higher than average intelligence probably did their best to avoid being elected.

Strange as it may seem--or perhaps it does not seem so strange--they all had the same thought: it was so much easier to kill humans on the battlefield than animals in cages, even if, on the battlefield, one might end up being killed oneself.

I think it's an amazing achievement to find even one specific thing that you're interested in.

No one noticed that I had changed- that I had given up sleep entirely, that I was spending all my time reading, that my mind was someplace a hundred years -- and hundreds of miles -- from reality.

The ones with no imagination are always the quickest to justify themselves.

Generally, people who are good at writing letters have no need to write letters. They've got plenty of life to lead inside their own context.

I've never once thought about how I was going to die, she said. I can't think about it. I don't even know how I'm going to live.

Sometimes when I look at you, I feel I'm gazing at a distant star.
It's dazzling, but the light is from tens of thousands of years ago.
Maybe the star doesn't even exist any more. Yet sometimes that light seems more real to me than anything.

I all of a sudden got to feeling like talking to people. Whenever I look at the ocean, I always want to talk to people, but when I'm talking to people, I always want to look at the ocean. I'm weird like that.

Somewhere in his body -- perhaps in the marrow of his bones -- he would continue to feel her absence.

It's all matter of attitude. You could let a lot of things bother you if you wanted to But it's pretty much the same anywhere you go, you can manage.

It is very simple, actually. It is because you and Tengo were so powerfully drawn to each other.

Like a button on a shirt buttoned wrong, every attempt to correct things led to yet another fine -- not to say elegant -- mess.

Allegories and metaphors are not something you should explain in words. You just grasp them and accept them.

I've had sex with lots of guys, but I think I did it mostly out of fear. I was scared not to have somebody putting his arms around me, so I could never say no. That's all. Nothing good ever came of sex like that. All it does is grind down the meaning of life a piece at a time.

Them-and-us-attitude.

The world's filled with things I don't know about.

We can, if we so choose, wander aimlessly over the continent of the arbitrary. Rootless as some winged seed blown about on a serendipitous spring breeze.

The pure present is an ungraspable advance of the past devouring the future.

It's my motto for life. 'Walk slowly; drink lots of water.'

Considering the sense of powerlessness that such a state of affairs would bring about, to have people floating in a pool of mysterious question marks seems like a minor sin.

Reality's just the accumulation of ominous prophecies come to life. All you have to do is open a newspaper on any given day to weigh the good news versus the bad news, and you'll see what I mean.

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

Opera lovers may be the narrowest people in the world.

The moon had been observing the earth close-up longer than anyone. It must have witnessed all of the phenomena occurring -- and all of the acts carried out -- on this earth. But the moon remained silent; it told no stories.

My world foreshortened, flattening into a credit card. Seen head on, things seemed merely skewed, but from the side the view was virtually meaningless -- a one-dimensional wafer. Everything about me may have been crammed in there, but it was only plastic. Indecipherable except to some machine.

It was a short one-paragraph item in the morning edition.

No matter how advanced the system, no matter how precise, unless we have the will to communicate, there's no connection. And even supposing the will is there, there are times like now when we don't know the other party's number. Or even if we know the number, we misdial.

I shouted into the phone, but there was no reply. Silence floated up from the receiver like smoke from the mouth of a gun.

In most cases learning something essential in life requires physical pain.

To sleep with a woman: it can seem of the utmost importance in your mind, or then again it can seem like nothing much at all. Which only goes to say that there's sex as therapy (self-therapy, that is) and there's sex as pastime.

I'm just ordinary guy, ordinary family, ordinary education, ordinary face, ordinary exam results, ordinary thought in my head.

People are drawn deeper into tragedy not by their defects but by their virtues.

In everybody's life there's a point of no return. And in a very few cases, a point where you can't go forward anymore. And when we reach that point, all we can do is quietly accept the fact. That's how we survive.

Don't get impatient. Even if things are so tangled up, you can't do anything, don't get desperate or blow a fuse and start yanking on one particular thread before it's ready to come undone. You have to realise it's going to be a long process and that you'll work on things slowly, one at a time.

There are many things we only see clearly in retrospect.

I learned that realism can come in all shapes and sizes. The world is big
enough for different values to coexist.

A revelation leaps over the borders of the everyday. A life without revelation is no life at all. What you need to do is move from reason that observes to reason that acts. That's what's critical.

If there's something I can't do but want to, I won't relax until I'm able to do it.

Living like an empty shell is not really living, no matter how many years it might go on.

It's all a question of imagination. Our responsibility begins with the power to imagine.