Quotes by Haruki Murakami
(Page 5 of 7)

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.

Listen up -- there's no war that will end all wars.

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.