Quotes by Haruki Murakami (Page 3 of 5)

It's hard to tell the difference between sea and sky, between voyager and sea. Between reality and the workings of the heart.

The new day is almost here, but the old one is still dragging its heavy skirts. Just as ocean water and river water struggle against each other at a river mouth, the old time and the new time clash and blend.

Don't pointless things have a place, too, in this far-from-perfect world?

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.

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

Forgive me for stating the obvious, but the world is made up of all kinds of people.

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.

It's a terrible thing when a person dies, whatever the circumstances. A hole opens up in the world, and we need to pay the proper respects. If we don't, the hole will never be filled in again.

I dream. Sometimes I think that's the only right thing to do. To dream, to live in the world of dreams. But it doesn't last forever. Wakefulness always comes to take me back.

You know, eating's much more important than most people think. There comes a time in your life when you've just got to have something super-delicious. And when you're standing at that crossroads your whole life can change, depending on which one you go into -- the good restaurant or the awful one.

In those days I used to talk to myself as if reciting poetry.

When the orbits of these two satellites of ours happened to cross paths, we could be together. Maybe even open our hearts to each other. But that was only for the briefest moment. In the next instant we'd be in absolute solitude. Until we burned up and became nothing.

Love with complications. Scenery was the last thing on my mind.

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.

I am struck by how, except when you're young, you really need to prioritize in life, figuring out in what order you should divide up your time and energy. If you don't get that sort of system set by a certain age, you'll lack focus and your life will be out of balance.

As time goes on, you'll understand. What lasts, lasts; what doesn't, doesn't. Time solves most things. And what time can't solve, you have to solve yourself.

Where was i now? I had no idea. No idea at all. Where was this place? All that flashed into my eyes were the countless shapes of people walking by to nowhere. Again and again I called out for Midori from the dead centre of this place that was no place.

People leave strange little memories behind when they die.

Like Naokuo, I'm not really sure what it means to love another person. Though she meant it a little differently. I do want to try my best though. I have to, or else I won't know where to go. Like you said before, Naoko and I have to save each other. It's the only was for us to be saved!

With the advent of winter, her eyes seemed to take on a greater transparency, a transparency that lead nowhere. Occassionally, for no particular reason, Naoko would gaze into my eyes as if searching for something. Each time I was filled with odd sensations of lonliness and inadequecy.

I don't want our relationship to end like this. You're one of the very few friends I have, and it hurts not being able to see you. When am I going to be able to talk to you? I want you to tell me that much, at least.

What a terrible thing it is to wound someone you really care for and to do it so unconsciously.

Our faces were no more than ten inches apart but she was lightyears away from me.

That's all I think about these days. Must be because I have so much time to kill every day. When you don't have anything to do, your thoughts get really, really far out -- so far out you can't follow them all the way to the end.

Killing time is not an easy job.

Narratives have the same power, I think. Some readers of my novels ask me, Why do you understand me? That's a huge pleasure of mine because it means that readers and I can make our narratives relative.

Person A understand Person B because the time is right for that to happen, not because Person B wants to be understood by Person A.

This uneasiness comes over me from time to time, and I feel as if I've somehow been pieced together from two different puzzles.

Whether it's good for anything or not, cool or totally uncool, in the final analysis what's most important is what you can't see but can feel in your heart.

I could feel a small polished stone sinking through the darkest waters of my heart. All those deep convoluted channels and passageways, and yet she managed to toss her pebble right down to the bottom of it all.

This is what it means to live on. When granted hope, a person uses it as fuel, as a guidepost to life. It is impossible to live without hope.

One last word of advice, though, Mr. Okada, though you may not want to hear this. There are things in this world it is better not to know about. Of course, those are the very things that people most want to know about. It's strange.

The grounds of the place were dominated by several large, old willow trees that towered over the surrounding stone wall and swayed soundlessly in the wind like lost souls.

I'm going to take you out of here ... I'm going to take you home, to the world where you belong, where cats with bent tails live, and there are little backyards, and alarm clocks ring in the morning.

You know what I'd really like to do the most right now? Climb up to the top of some high place like the pyramids. The highest place I can find. Where you can see forever. Stand on the very top, look all around the world, see all the scenery, and see with my own eyes what's been lost from the world.

If writing novels is like planting a forest, then writing short stories is more like planting a garden.

It was spring break, so the theater was always packed with high schools students. It was an animal house. I wanted to burn the place down.

What if I've forgotten the most important thing? What if somewhere inside me there is a dark limbo where all the truly important memories are heaped and slowly turning into mud?...the thought fills me with an almost unbearable sorrow.

It is a lonely life sometimes, like throwing a stone into the deep darkness. It might hit something, but you can't see it. The only thing you can do is to guess, and to believe.

He appeared before me and departed. We were not able to speak to or touch each other. But in that short interval, he transformed many things inside me. He literally stirred my mind and body the way a spoon stirs a cup of cocoa, down to the depths of my internal organs and my womb.

Once thing goes wrong, then the whole house of cards collapses. And there's no way you can extricate yourself. Until someone comes along to drag you out.

We heard no other sounds. We met no other people. We saw only two bright red birds leap startled from the center of the meadow and dart into the woods.

Let me tell you something, Mari. The ground we stand on looks solid enough, but if something happens it can drop right out from under you. And once that happens, you've had it: things'll never be the same. All you can do is go on, living alone down there in the darkness.

Loving another person is a wonderful thing, and if that love is sincere, no one ends up tossed into a labyrinth. You have to have more faith in yourself.

Tengo could hardly believe it -- that in this frantic, labyrinth-like world, two people's hearts -- a boy's and a girl's -- could be connected, unchanged, even though they hadn't seen each other for twenty years.

It's not right for one friend to do all the giving and the other to do all the taking: that's not real friendship.

Problem is, once I sit at my desk and put all these down on paper. I realize something vital is missing. It doesn't crystallize -- no crystals, just pebbles. And I'm not transported anywhere.

In his own way, he's lived life with all the intensity he could muster.

What do you think? I'm not a starfish or a pepper tree. I'm a living, breathing human being. Of course I've been in love.

Strictly speaking, it might not be a dream. It was reality, but a reality imbued with all the qualities of a dream. A different sphere of reality, where -- at a special time and place -- imagination had been set free.

By then running had entered the realm of the metaphysical. First there came the action of running, and accompanying it there was this entity known as me. I run; therefore I am.

As I already explaned, I don't have any form. I'm a conceptual metaphysical object.

You might think you made a new world or a new self, but your old self is always gonna be there, just below the surface, and if something happens, it'll stick its head out and say 'Hi.' You don't seem to realize that. You were made somewhere else.

You need to come face-to-face with the past, not as some naive, easily wounded boy, but as a grown-up, independent professional. Not to see what you want to see, but what you must see. Otherwise you'll carry around that baggage for the rest of your life.

Two-thirds of earth's surface is ocean, and all we can see with the naked eye is the surface.

Constipation was one of the things she hated most in the world, on par with despicable men who commit domestic violence and narrow-minded religious fundamentalists.

Suicides? Heart attacks? The papers didn't seem interested. The world was full of ways to die, too many to cover. Newsworthy deaths had to be exceptional. Most people go unobserved.

Not that running away's going to solve everything. I don't want to rain on your parade or anything, but I wouldn't count on escaping this place if I were you. No matter how far you run. Distance might not solve anything.

Time is too conceptual. Not that it stops us from filling it in. So much so, we can't even tell whether our experiences belong to time or to the world of physical things.

Perhaps most people in the world aren't trying to be free, Kafka. They just think they are. It's all an illusion. If they really were set free, most people would be in a real pickle. You'd better remember that. People actually prefer not being free?

I am living in hell from one day to the next. But there is nothing I can do to escape. I don't know where I would go if I did. I feel utterly powerless, and that feeling is my prision. I entered of my own free will, I locked the door, and I threw away the key.

A state of chronic powerlessness eats away at a person.

This is no honky-tonk parade. 1Q84 is the real world, where a cut draws real blood, where pain is real pain and fear is real fear. The moon in the sky is no paper moon.

A story is not something of this world. A real story requires a kind of magical baptism to link the world on this side with the world on the other side.

The pillow smells like the sunlight, a precious smell.

I'm forever realizing things too late.

I hate requests. They make me feel unhappy. It's like when I take a book out of the library. As soon as I start to read it, all I can think about is when I'll finish it.

That's when I gave up pinball. When the times comes, everybody gives up pinball. Nothing more to it.

The real world--where I probably could never be happy, and never get anywhere.

The silence grew deeper, so deep that if you listened carefully you might very well catch the sound of the earth revolving on its axis.

Silence. How long it lasted, I couldn't tell. It might have been five seconds, it might have been a minute. Time wasn't fixed. It wavered, stretched, shrank. Or was it me that wavered, stretched, and shrank in the silence? I was warped in the folds of time, like a reflection in a fun house mirror.

I go back to the reading room, where I sink down in the sofa and into the world of The Arabian Nights. Slowly, like a movie fadeout, the real world evaporates. I'm alone, inside the world of the story. My favourite feeling in the world.

Even at a time like this, the street is bright enough and filled with people coming and going--people with places to go and people with no place to go; people with a purpose and people with no purpose; people trying to hold time back and people trying to urge it forward.

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.

I don't know -- maybe the world has two different kinds of people, and for one kind the world is this completely logical, rice pudding place, and for the other it's all hit-or-miss macaroni gratin.

I tell lies sometimes. The last time I lied was a year ago. I absolutely detest lying. You could say that lying and silence are the two greatest sins of present day society. Actually, I lie a lot, and I'm always clamming up.

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

It's like the Tibetan Wheel of the Passions. As the wheel turns, the values and feelings on the outer rim rise and fall, shining or sinking into darkness. But true love stays fastened to the axle and doesn't move.

A cell is just a room if you don't lock the door.

This was the second stage in my life, a step in my personal evolution -- abandoning the idea of being different, and settling for normal... Gradually I drew nearer to the world, and the world drew nearer to me.

You've already decided what you're going to do, and all that's left is to set the wheels in motion. I mean, it's your life. Basically, you gotta go with what you think is right.

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

It seems to me that very sad things always contain an element of the comical.

The sad truth is that certain types of things can't go backward. Once they start going forward, no matter what you do, they can't go back the way they were. If even one little thing goes awry, then that's how it will stay forever.

Life: I'll never understand it.

I learned there were lots of realities in the world.

They were each like a mirror for the other, reflecting the changes in themselves.

My shadow is only half of what it should be.
Everyone has their shortcomings.

It's pretty thin, the wall separating healthy confidence and unhealthy Pride.

I was reduced to pure concept. My flesh had dissolved; my form had dissipated. I floated in space. Liberated of my corporeal being, but without dispensation to go anywhere else.I was adrift in the void. Somewhere across the fine line separating nightmare from reality.

Sometimes taking time is actually a shortcut.

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.

It might not be perfect, but the fundamental stance I adopted with regard to my home was to accept it, problems and all, because it was something I myself had chosen. If it had problems, these were almost certainly problems that had originated within me.

Waves of thought are stirring. In a twilight corner of her consciousness, one tiny fragment and another tiny fragment call out wordlessly to eachother, their spreading ripples intermingling.

Between a high, solid wall and an egg that breaks against it, I will always stand on the side of the egg.

When you're young, you think you can handle anything. By the time you find out otherwise, it's already too late. You got a stocking wrapped around your neck.

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

If you keep on writing for three years, every day, you should be strong. Of course, you have to be strong mentally, also. But in the first place, you have to be strong physically. That is a
very important thing. Physically and mentally you have to be strong.

That's good. I was worried. Of course, I do have a few things wrong with me, but those are strictly problems I keep inside. I'd hate to think they were obvious to anybody else. Especially at the swimming pool in the summer.

I've translated a lot of American literature into Japanese, and I think that what makes a good translator is, above all, a feel for language and also a great affection for the work you're translating. If one of those elements is missing the translation won't be worth much.

Nakata's empty inside... Do you know what it means to be completely empty? Being empty is like a vacant house. An unlocked, vacant house. Anybody can come in, anytime they want. That's what scares me the most.

I write weird stories. I don't know why I like weirdness so much ... But when I write, I write weird. That's very strange. When I'm getting more and more serious, I'm getting more and more weird.

What gave money its true meaning was its dark-night namelessness, its breathtaking interchangeability.

An expectation was there, mixed in with so many other emotions -- excitement, resignation, hesitation, confusion, fear -- that would well up then wither on the vine. 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.

Nights without work I spend with whisky and books.

I think of myself as more the non-turn-on type. so when I do get turned on, I don't trust it, I have to investigate the source.

I have these realistic dreams and snap wide awake in the middle of the night. And for a while I can't work out what's real and what isn't... That kind of feeling. Do you have any idea what I'm saying?

People need routines. It's like a theme in music. But it also restrictsyour thoughts and actions and limits your freedom. It structures your priorities and in some cases distorts your logic.

Whether you take the doughnut hole as a blank space or as an entity unto itself is a purely metaphysical question and does not affect the taste of the doughnut one bit.

The others in the dorm thought I wanted to be a writer, because I was always alone with a book, but I had no such ambition. There was nothing I wanted to be.

Ideas are like beards. Men don't have them until they grow up.

The second whiskey is always my favorite. From the third on, it no longer has any taste. It's just something to pour into your stomach.

Whiskey, like a beautiful woman, demands appreciation. You gaze first, then it's time to drink.

I'm all alone, but I'm not lonely.

No matter how much time passes, no matter what takes place in the interim, there are some things we can never assign to oblivion, memories we can never rub away.

Like flowers scattered in a storm, a man's life is a long farewell.

The fresh smell of coffee soon wafted through the apartment, the smell that separates night from day.

Thanks to the long days of rain, the blades of grass glowed with a deep-green luster, and they gave off the smell of wildness unique to things that sink their roots into the earth.

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.

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

You know, the usual story. Once upon a time I was playing my harp by a spring when a fairy appeared out of nowhere, handed me a Beretta Model 92, and told me to shoot the white rabbit over there for target practice.

I could feel her breasts up against my stomach. I wanted a beer real bad.

It's because of you when I'm in bed in the morning that I can wind my spring and tell myself I have to live another good day.

With luck, it might even snow for us.

Just because there's an end doesn't mean existence has meaning. An end point is simply set up as a temporary marker, or perhaps as an indirect metaphor for the fleeting nature of existence.