Haruki Murakami Quotes - Page 7

I might have been afraid that if I really loved someone and needed her, one day she might suddenly disappear without a word, and I'd be left all alone.

You live by yourself for a stretch of time and you get to staring at different objects. Sometimes you talk to yourself. You take meals in crowded joints. You develop an intimate relationship with your used Subaru. You slowly but surely become a has-been.

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. (from Thailand)

As a teacher, Tengo pounded into his students' heads how voraciously mathematics demanded logic. Here things that could not be proven had no meaning, but once you had succeeded in proving something, the world's riddles settled into the palm of your hand like a tender oyster.

I myself, as I’m writing, don’t know who did it. The readers and I are on the same ground. When I start to write a story, I don’t know the conclusion at all and I don’t know what’s going to happen next. If there is a murder case as the first thing, I don’t know who the killer is. I write the book because I would like to find out. If I know who the killer is, there’s no purpose to writing the story.

Latter-day capitalism. Like it or not, it's the society we live in. Even the standard of right and wrong has been subdivided, made sophisticated. Within good, there's fashionable good and unfashionable good, and ditto for bad. Within fashionable good, there's formal and then there's casual; there's hip, there's cool, there's trendy, there's snobbish. Mix 'n' match. Like pulling on a Missoni sweater over Trussardi slacks and Pollini shoes, you can now enjoy hybrid styles of morality. It's the way of the world -- philosophy starting to look more and more like business administration.

I could never tell what was going on inside the pretty heads of the girls that Naoko brought along, and they probably couldn't understand me, either.

It's easy to talk big, but the important thing is whether or not you clean up the shit.

It's not as if our lives are simply divided into light and dark. There's a shadowy middle ground. Recognizing and understanding the shadows is what a healthy intelligence does.

The world is full of ways and means to waste time

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

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

For darkness terrifies. It swallows you, warps you, nullifies you. Who alive can possibly profess confidence in darkness? In the dark, you can't see.

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

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.

Memory is like fiction: or else it' fiction that's like memory.

I guess time doesn't flow in order, does it - A, B, C, D? It just sort of goes where it feels like going.

In the end, like so many beautiful promises in our lives, that dinner date never came to be.

Of course it hurt that we could never love each other in a physical way. We would have been far more happy if we had. But that was like the tides, the change of seasons--something immutable, an immovable destiny we could never alter. No matter how cleverly we might shelter it, our delicate friendship wasn't going to last forever. We were bound to reach a dead end. That was painfully clear.

Words left their mouths to hang frozen in midair.

Civilization is communication. When that which should be expressed and transmitted is lost, civilization comes to an end.

Hatred is like a tow-edged sword. When you cut the other person, you cut yourself.

It was as if-this is something I thought of only later, of course-she was gently peeling bcd one layer after another hat covered a person's heart, a very sensual feeling.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau defined civilization as when people build fences. A very perceptive observation. And it’s true—all civilization is the product of a fenced-in lack of freedom. The Australian Aborigines are the exception, though. They managed to maintain a fenceless civilization until the seventeenth century. They’re dyed-in-the-wool free. They go where they want, when they want, doing what they want. Their lives are a literal journey. Walkabout is a perfect metaphor for their lives. When the English came and built fences to pen in their cattle, the Aborigines couldn’t fathom it. And, ignorant to the end of the principle at work, they were classified as dangerous and antisocial and were driven away, to the outback. So I want you to be careful. The people who build high, strong fences are the ones who survive the best. You deny that reality only at the risk of being driven into the wilderness yourself.

Telling lies is a really terrible thing. These days, lies and silence are the two greatest sins in human society you might say. In reality, we tell lots of lies, and we often break into silence. However, if we were constant;y talking year-round, and telling only the truth truth would probably lose some of its value.

Your "scared" and my "scared" are two different things.''What's that supposed to mean?' she asked.'As you get older, you don't recover from things so easy.''As you get older, you also get tired?''Yeah,' I said, 'you get tired.

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.

Some things in life are too complicated to explain in any language.

People do change. And no matter how close we once were, and how much we opened up to each other, maybe neither if us know anything substantial about the other.

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.

Life is long, and sometimes cruel. Sometimes victims are needed. Someone has to take on that role. And human bodies are fragile, easily damaged. Cut them, and they bleed.

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.

History cannot be erased or altered.Because that would mean killing yourself.

He calmed himself, shut his eyes, and fell asleep. The rear light of consciousness, like the last express train of the night, began to fade into the distance, gradually speeding up, growing smaller until it was, finally, sucked into the depths of night, where it disappeared. All that remained was the sound of the wind slipping through a stand of white birch trees.

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

Every one of us is losing something precious to us. Lost opportunities, lost possibilities, feelings we can never get back again. That’s what part of it means to be alive. But inside our heads — at least that’s where I imagine it — there’s a little room where we store those memories. A room like the stacks in this library. And to understand the workings of our own heart we have to keep on making new reference cards. We have to dust things off every once in a while, let fresh air in, change the water in the flower vases. In other words, you’ll live for ever in your own private library.

Time flows in strange ways on Sundays, and sights become mysteriously distorted.

In his or her own way, everyone I saw before me looked happy. Whether they were really happy or just looked it, I couldn't tell. But they did look happy on this pleasant early afternoon in late September, and because of that I felt a kind of loneliness new to me, as if I were the only one here who was not truly part of the scene.

I never once thought I wanted to be a soldier. I wanted to be a teacher. As soon as I left college, though, they sent me my draft notice, stuck me in officers training, and I ended up on the continent for twelve years. My life went by like a dream.

it's a fine moon', she repeated

It's a dark, cool, quiet place. A basement in your soul. And that place can sometimes be dangerous to the human mind. I can open the door and enter that darkness, but I have to be very careful. I can find my story there. Then I bring that thing to the surface, into the real world.

The whole universe is like some big FedEx box.

My words did not seem to reach her. Or, if they did, she was unable to grasp their meaning.

I feel very strongly that all Japanese at that time had the idea drilled into them of 1999 being the end of the world. Aum renunciates have already accepted, inside themselves, the end of the world, because when they become a renunciate, they discard themselves totally, thereby abandoning the world. In other words, Aum is a collection of people who have accepted the end. People who continue to hold out hope for the near future still have an attachment to the world. If you have attachments, you will not discard your Self, but for Renunciates it's as if they've leaped right off the cliff. And taking a giant leap like that feels good. They lose something - but gain something in return.

The little things are important, Mr. Wind-Up Bird,

She was a keen observer, a precise user of language, sharp-tongued and funny. She could stir your emotions. Yes, really, that's what she was so good at - stirring people's emotions, moving you. And she knew she had this power...I only realized later. At the time, I had no idea what she was doing to me.

Wasn't it better if they kept this desire to see each other hidden within them, and never actually got together? That way, there would always be hope in their hearts. That hope would be a small, yet vital flame that warmed them to their core-- a tiny flame to cup one's hands around and protect from the wind, a flame that the violent winds of reality might easily extinguish.

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

Reality spilled out into the alley like water from an overfilled bowl - as sound, as smell, as image, as plea, as response.

Death leaves cans of shaving cream half-used.

We truly believed in something back then, and we knew we were the kind of people capable of believing in something - with all our hearts. And that kind of hope will never simply vanish.

Sometimes I feel as if I'm racing with my own shadow

Even chance meetings are the result of karma… Things in life are fated by our previous lives. That even in the smallest events there’s no such thing as coincidence.

Her words didn’t have the acrid smell of death.

Kindness and a caring mind are two separate qualities. Kindness is manners. It is superficial custom, an acquired practice. Not so the mind. The mind is deeper, stronger, and, I believe, it is far more inconstant.

Unable to sleep after the others had drowsed off, I crawled out of the tent and lay on the ground, looking at the sky. Now and then, a shooting star would trace a bright arc across the heavens. The longer I watched, though, the more nervous it made me. There were simply too many stars, and the sky was too vast and deep. A huge, overpowering foreign object, it surrounded me, enveloped me, and made me feel almost dizzy. Until that moment, I had always thought that the earth on which I stood was a solid object that would last forever. Or rather, I had never thought about such a thing at all. I had simply taken it for granted.

Energies expended on sideshows, never on the main event. Where the hell was the main event? Was there a main event?

Or maybe that’s what it’s all about: this religion’s substance is its lack of substance. In McLuhanesque terms, the medium is the message. Some people might find that cool.”“McLuhanesque?”“Hey, look, even I read a book now and then,” Ayumi protested. “McLuhan was ahead of his time. He was so popular for a while that people tend not to take him seriously, but what he had to say was right.”“In other words, the package itself is the contents. Is that it?”“Exactly. The characteristics of the package determine the nature of the contents, not the other way around.

Can'ttrustpeople. Won'tdoanygood. They'llkillyoueverytime. They'llkilleachother. They'llkilleveryone.

Guns are like cars: you can trust a good used one better than one that's brand new.