Quotes by Haruki Murakami (Page 3 of 4)

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.

I'll be happy if running and I can grow old together.

I'm often asked what I think about as I run. Usually the people who ask this have never run long distances themselves. I always ponder the question. What exactly do I think about when I'm running? I don't have a clue.

Exerting yourself to the fullest within your individual limits: that's the essence of running, and a metaphor for life.

Taking crazy things seriously is a serious waste of time.

If you can't understand it without an explanation, you can't understand it with an explanation.

Now for a good twelve-hour sleep, I told myself. Twelve solid hours. Let birds sing, let people go to work. Somewhere out there, a volcano might blow, Israeli commandos might decimate a Palestinian village. I couldn't stop it. I was going to sleep.

A gentleman is someone who does not what he wants to do but what he should do.

Life is not like water. Things in life don't necessarily flow over the shortest possible route.

Distance might not solve anything, no matter how far you run.

Colours shone with exceptional clarity in the rain. The ground was a deep black, the pine branches a brilliant green, the people wrapped in yellow looking like special spirits that were allowed to wander over the earth on rainy mornings only.

People die all the time. Life is a lot more fragile than we think. So you should treat others in a way that leaves no regrets. Fairly, and if possible, sincerely. It's too easy not to make the effort, then weep and wring your hands after the person dies.

Not that we were incompatible: we just had nothing to talk about.

In this whole, wide world, the only thing that treats me so kindly is math.

In long-distance running the only opponent you have to beat is yourself, the way you used to be.

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 bare it, and wind up saying things I shouldn't.

My flesh may have to be consumed, but my mind belongs to me. I'm keeping it for myself. I will not hand it over to anyone.

Maybe it's just hiding somewhere. Or gone on a trip to come home. But falling in love is always a pretty crazy thing. It might appear out of the blue and just grab you. Who knows -- maybe even tomorrow.

Life's no piece of cake, mind you, but the recipe's my own to fool with.

If I stayed here, something inside me would be lost forever--something I couldn't afford to lose. It was like a vague dream, a burning, unfulfilled desire. The kind of dream people have only when they're seventeen.

That's gotta be one of the principles behind reality. Accepting things that are hard to comprehend, and leaving them that way.

A person's last moments are an important thing. You can't choose how you're born but you can choose how you die.

During dry spells, the whole river used to dry up into sandy bed, leaving only a faintly damp white trail. Years ago, on my walks I'd trace that trail upstream, searching for where the river had gone.

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.

Sometimes fate is like a small sandstorm that keeps changing directions. You change direction but the sandstorm chases you. You turn again, but the storm adjusts.

I'm not totally mad at you. I'm just sad. You're all locked up in that little world of yours, and when I try knocking on the door, you just sort of look up for a second and go right back inside.

Hundreds of butterflies flitted in and out of sight like short-lived punctuation marks in a stream of consciousness without beginning or end.

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.

When I open them, most of the books have the smell of an earlier time leaking out between the pages -- a special odor of the knowledge and emotions that for ages have been calmly resting between the covers. Breathing it in, I glance through a few pages before returning each book to its shelf.

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.

People's memories are maybe the fuel they burn to stay alive.

A theory is a battlefield in your head.

You can hide memories, but you can't erase the history that produced them.

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

You don't have to judge the whole world by your own standards. Not everybody is like you, you know.

I just run. I run in void. Or maybe I should put it the other way: I run in order to acquire a void.

I move, therefore I am.

All I do is keep on running in my own cozy, homemade void, my own nostalgic silence. And this is a pretty wonderful thing. No matter what anybody else says.

Don't you think it would be wonderful to get rid of everything and everybody and just go some place where you don't know a soul?

When I'm running I don't have to talk to anybody and don't have to listen to anybody. This is a part of my day I can't do without.

Be fearless, be brave, be bold, love yourself.

It was as good as sealing yourself into a dungeon. Walled in, with nowhere to go but your own doom.

I also happened to identify with Julien Sorel. Sorel's basic character flaws had all cemented by the age of fifteen, a fact which further elicited my sympathy. To have all the building blocks of your life in place by that age was, by any standard, a tragedy.

The years 19 and 20 are a crucial stage in the maturation of character, and if you allow yourself to become warped when you're that age, it will cause you pain when you're older. It's true. So think about it carefully.

Grandfather always said school's a place where they take sixteen years to wear down your brain. Grandfather hardly went to school either.

Even a rat will choose the least painful route if you shock him enough.

I was living for one thing only, and that was to confirm my own lack of feeling.

No, I don't think I've been defiled. But I haven't been saved, either. There's nobody who can save me right now, Mr. Wind-Up Bird. The world looks totally empty to me. Everything I see around me looks fake. The only thing thay isn't fake is that gooshy thing inside me.

Flaws in oneself open you up to others with flaws.

I feel like I've swallowed a cloudy sky.

The world -- the word always makes me think of a tortoise and elephants tirelessly supporting a gigantic disc. The elephants have no knowledge of the tortoise's role, the tortoise unable to see what the elephants are doing. And neither is the least aware of the world on their backs.

I don't give a damn about power and money per se. Really, I don't. I may be a selfish bastard, but I'm incredibly cool about shit like that. I could be a Zen saint. The one thing I do have, though, is curiosity. I want to see what I can do out there in the big, tough world.

The body is not the only target of rape. Violence does not always take visible form, and not all wounds gush blood.

Girls have periods and boys jerk off. Everybody.

You slowly but surely become a has-been.

No matter what we said, people would believe what they wanted to believe. The more we struggled, the more vulnerable we'd be.

You can't go anywhere if you just resign yourself to being attacked. A state of chronic powerlessness eats away at a person.

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

To Tengo, sexual desire was fundamentally an extension of a means of communication. And so, to look for sexual desire in a place where there was no possibility of communication seemed inappropriate to him.

In the midst of life, everything revolved around death.

Alright, then, where do the lost names go? The probability of their surviving in the maze of a city must be extremely low.

Waiting for your answer is one of the most painful things.

I miss her every now and then, but finally, she didn't move me. I don't know, sometimes I think I've got this hard kernel in my heart, and nothing much can get inside it.

Thinking of all I had lost in the course of my life: times gone for ever, friends who had died or disappeared, feelings I would never know again.

It almost hurt to look at that far-off sky.

It just happens to be the way I'm made. I have to write things down to feel I fully comprehend them.

She and I had needed each other more than either of us knew.

For a certain kind of person, love begins from something tiny or silly. From something like that or it doesn't begin at all.

Everything ended in silence. The beasts and spirits heaved a deep breath, broke up their encirclement, and returned to the depths of a forest that had lost its heart.

If you hurt her any more than you already have, the wound could be too deep to fix.

Next she turned the gun upward and thrust the muzzle into her mouth. Now it was aimed directly at her cerebrum -- the gray labyrinth where consciousness resided.

I wrote letters in the classroom, I wrote letters at my desk at home with Seagull in my lap, I wrote letters at empty tables during my breaks at the Italian restaurant. It was as if I were writing letters to hold together the pieces of my crumbling life.

Even now, whenever I think of her, I envision a quiet Sunday morning. A gentle, clear day, just getting under way. No homework to do, just a Sunday when you could do what you wanted. She always gave me this kick-back-and-relax, Sunday-morning kind of feeling.

But the forecasters and media types were clever -- they never used vague words like maybe. No, they stuck with convenient terms for which no one could be held accountable, like probability of precipitation.

Intelligent teenage girls were often instinctively theatrical, purposely eccentric, mouthing highly suggestive words to confuse people.

Where I went in my travels, it's impossible for me to recall. I remember the sights and sounds and smells clearly enough, but the names of the towns are gone, as well as any sense of the order in which I traveled from place to place.

But it has finally hit me: she is neither a concept nor a symbol nor a metaphor. She actually exists: she has warm flesh and a spirit that moves. I never should have lost sight of that warmth and that movement.

Her cry was the saddest sound of orgasm that I had ever heard.

Remove everything pointless from an imperfect life and it'd lose even its imperfection.

She was the kind of person who took care of things by herself. She'd never ask anybody for advice or help. It wasn't a matter of pride, I think. She just did what seemed natural to her.

Look at the rain long enough, with no thoughts in your head, and you gradually feel your body falling loose, shaking free of the world of reality. Rain has the power to hypnotize.

We're all kind of weird and twisted and drowning.

I think that my job is to observe people and the world, and not to judge them. I always hope to position myself away from so-called conclusions. I would like to leave everything wide open to all the possibilities in the world.

I'd be smiling and chatting away, and my mind would be floating around somewhere else, like a balloon with a broken string.

A certain type of perfection can only be realized through a limitless accumulation of the imperfect.

Memories warm you up from the inside. But they also tear you apart.

747s always reminded me of a fat, ugly old lady in the neighborhood where I used to live. Huge sagging breasts, swollen legs, dried-up neckline.

Nobody's going to win all the time. On the highway of life you can't always be in the fast lane.

Memories and thoughts age, just as people do. But certain thoughts can never age, and certain memories can never fade.

As long as you have the courage to admit mistakes, things can be turned around.

There is nothing so cruel in this world as the desolation of having nothing to hope for.

I would never see her again, except in memory. She was here, and now she's gone. There is no middle ground. Probably is a word that you may find south of the border. But never, ever west of the sun.

People leave traces of themselves where they feel most comfortable, most worthwhile.

The world follows its own course. Each possesses his own thoughts, each treads his own path. So it is with your mother, and so it is with your starling. As it is with everyone. The world follows its own course.

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.

Everybody has to start somewhere. You have your whole future ahead of you. Perfection doesn't happen right away.

Curiosity can bring guts out of hiding at times, maybe even get them going. But curiosity usually evaporates. Gust have to go for the long haul. Curiosity's like a fun friend you can't really trust. It turns you on and then it leaves you to make it on your own -- with whatever guts you can muster.

Losing you is most difficult for me, but the nature of my love for you is what matters. If it distorts into half-truth, then perhaps it is better not to love you. I must keep my mind but loose you.

She waited for the train to pass. Then she said, I sometimes think that people's hearts are like deep wells. Nobody knows what's at the bottom. All you can do is imagine by what comes floating to the surface every once in a while.

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 young and talented, it's like you have wings.

The rain that fell on the city runs down the dark gutters and empties into the sea without even soaking the ground.

Surfing's a more profound kind of sport than it looks. When you surf, you learn not to fight the power of nature, even if it gets violent.

I spent thirty-three years in another man's shadow. I went everywhere he went, I helped him with everything he did. I was in a sense a part of him. When you live like that for a long time, you gradually lose track of what it is you yourself really want out of life.

I just gave them a little scare. A touch of psychological terror. As Joseph Conrad once wrote, true terror is the kind that men feel towards their imagination. (from Super-frog Saves Tokyo).

Don't feel sorry for yourself. Only arseholes do that.

Don't tell me anymore. You should have your dream, as the old woman told you to. I understand how you feel, but if you put those feelings into words they will turn into lies.

But you know Hajime, some feelings cause us pain because they remain.

Someone once said that nothing costs more and yields less benefit than revenge, Aomame said.
Winston Churchill. As I recall it, though, he was making excuses for the British Empire's budget deficits. It has no moral significance.

Our hearts are not stones. A stone may disintegrate in time and lose its outward form. But hearts never disintegrate. They have no outward form, and whether good or evil, we can always communicate them to one another.

Everyone, deep in their hearts, is waiting for the end of the world to come.

What I was chasing in circles must have been the tail of the darkness inside me.

Most human activities are predicated on the assumption that life goes on. If you take that premise away, what is there left?

Why does loving somebody mean you have to hurt them as much?

There's no longer any place for a Big Brother in this real world of ours. Instead, these so-called Little People have come on the scene. Interesting verbal contrast, don't you think?

Sometimes, however, this sense of isolation, like acid spilling out of a bottle, can unconsciously eat away at a person's heart and dissolve it.

The moment I see her, there's a rumbling in my chest, and my mouth is as dry as a desert.

A friend to kill time is a friend sublime.

Aren't you afraid of dying?
Not really. I've watched lots of good-for-nothing, worthless people die, and if people like that can do it, then I should be able to handle it.

Time flows in a strange way on Sundays.

Sheep hurt my father, and through my father, sheep have also hurt me.

I never trust people with no appetite. It's like they're always holding something back on you.

Dreams come from the past, not from the future. Dreams shouldn't control you -- you should control them.

In dreams you don't need to make any distinctions between things. Not at all. Boundaries don't exist. So in dreams there are hardly ever collisions. Even if there are, they don't hurt. Reality is different. Reality bites. Reality, reality.

What happens when people open their hearts? They get better.

Most everything you think you know about me is nothing more than memories.

I'm safe inside this container called me.

Silence, I discover, is something you can actually hear.

Have your dream...What you need now more than anything is discipline. Cast off mere words. Words turn into stone. (from Thailand).

There was something odd for him about not feeling lonely. The very fact that he had ceased to be lonely caused him to fear the possibility of becoming lonely again.

Was the earth put here just to nourish human loneliness?

Sometimes I get real lonely sleeping with you.

From the moment of my birth, I lived with pain at the center of my life. My only purpose in life was to find a way to coexist with intense pain.

My short stories are like soft shadows I have set out in the world, faint footprints I have left. I remember exactly where I set down each and every one of them, and how I felt when I did. Short stories are like guideposts to my heart.

Is that what you see in my eyes, that you know nothing about me?
Nothing is written in your eyes. I replied.
It is written in my eyes and i see the reflection in yours.

There is an instinctive withdrawal for the sake of preservation, a closure that assumes the order of completion. Winter is a season unto itself.

I even felt a touch of sympathy for the difficulties he had faced in his life, however stupid and repulsive the shape of that life might appear to me.

I'll never see them again. I know that. And they know that. And knowing this, we say farewell.

Beyond the edge of the world there's a space where emptiness and substance neatly overlap, where past and future form a continuous, endless loop. And, hovering about, there are signs no one has ever read, chords no one has ever heard.

Not just beautiful, though -- the stars are like the trees in the forest, alive and breathing. And they're watching me.

It's a question of attitude. If you really work at something you can do it up to a point. If you really work at being happy you can do it up to a point. But anything more than that you can't. Anything more than that is luck.

I've decided to make myself strong. As far as I can tell, that's all I can do.

What a difference a day makes.

One day at a time.

I keep this routine every day without variation. The repetition itself becomes the important thing; it's a form of mesmerism. I mesmerize myself to reach a deeper state of mind.

To keep on going, you have to keep up the rhythm.

The silence is so deep it hurts our ears.

Deep rivers run quiet.

When you come out of the storm, you won't be the same person who walked in.

The answer is dreams. Dreaming on and on. Entering the world of dreams and never coming out. Living in dreams for the rest of time.

Some of us are luckier than others. Some are tough and some are weak. Some are rich and some poor. But no one's superman -- in that way, we're all weak. If we own things, we're terrified we'll lose them; if we've got nothing we worry it'll be that way forever. We're all the same.

I'm not very good at giving anyone a clear no.