Haruki Murakami Quotes - Page 9

(When asked “Was the model for Midori (a character in Norwegian Wood) modeled after your wife?”)I showed your message to my wife. She got mad and yelled: “What would make them think I was the model for Midori?!” She told me to fix the misunderstanding immediately, so that’s why I’m writing this reply now. Please stop causing problems in my household. Thank you.

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.

I never had what it takes to make a first-rate anything.''That's wrong,' she declared. 'Everyone must have one thing that they can excel at. It's just a matter of drawing it out, isn't it?' But school doesn't know how to draw it out. It crushes the gift. It's no wonder most people never get to be what they want to be. They just get ground down.

Passion can’t sustain itselfforever.

One other thing I learned from working in a company was that the majority of people in the world have no problem following orders. They're actually happy to be told what to do. They might complain, but that's not how they really feel. They just grumble out of habit. If you told them to think for themselves, and make their own decisions and take responsibility for them, they'd be clueless.

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.

But still, 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.

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

When I look back at myself at age twenty, what I remember most is being alone and lonely. I had no girlfriend to warm my body or my soul, no friends I could open up to. No clue what I should do every day, no vision for the future. For the most part, I remained hidden away, deep within myself. Sometimes, I'd go a week without talking to anybody.

It's unfair."As a rule, life is unfair," I said.Yeah, but I think I did say some awful things."To Dick?"Yeah."I pulled the car over to the shoulder of the road and turned off the ignition. "That's just stupid, that kind of thinking," I said, nailing her with my eyes. "Instead of regretting what you did, you could have treated him decently from the beginning. You could've tried to be fair. But you didn't. You don't even have the right to be sorry.

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.

When you prick a person with a needle, red blood comes out- that's the real world.

A gust of wind set the leaves of grass to dancing and celebrated the grass's song before it died.

Thinking about lunch. Smoked salmon with pedigreed lettuce and razor-sharp slices of onion that have been soaked in ice water, brushed with horseradish and mustard, served on French butter rolls baked in the hot ovens of Kinokuniya. A sandwich made in heaven

If you can love someone with your whole heart, even one person, then there's salvation in life. Even if you can't get together with that person.

I have a million things to talk to you about. All I want in this world is you. I want to see you and talk. I want the two of us to begin everything from the beginning.

Opera lovers may be the narrowest people in the world.

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

How can I be strong when I do not know my own mind? I am lost.""That's not true. You are not lost. It's just that your own thoughts are being kept from you, or hidden away. But the mind is strong. It survives, even without thought. Even with everything taken away, it holds a seed-- your self. You must believe in your own powers.

Once he gets to the fort the colonel turns to John Wayne and says, "I did see a few Indians on the way over here." And John Wayne, with this really cool look on his face, replies, 'Don't worry. If you were able to spot some Indians, that means there weren't any there.' I don't remember the actual lines, but it went something like that. Do you get what he means?

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 lose you.

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.

Quizás aun no te comprenda. Pero, con un poco de tiempo, llegaré a entenderte. Y no habrá nadie en el mundo que te comprenda mejor que yo.

I think memory is the most important asset of human beings. It’s a kind of fuel; it burns and it warms you. My memory is like a chest: There are so many drawers in that chest, and when I want to be a fifteen-year-old boy, I open up a certain drawer and I find the scenery I saw when I was a boy in Kobe. I can smell the air, and I can touch the ground, and I can see the green of the trees. That’s why I want to write a book.

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

A healthy amount of fear and respect might be a good idea

Because sometimes I have a need for human warmth, I answered honestly. Sometimes, if I can't feel something like the warmth of a woman's skin, I get so lonely I can't stand it.

You’re afraid of imagination. And even more afraid of dreams. Afraid of the responsibility that begins in dreams. But you have to sleep, and dreams are a part of sleep. When you’re awake you can suppress imagination. But you can’t suppress dreams.

When you come out of the storm, you won’t be the same person who walked in. That’s what this storm’s all about.

If there is a hard, high wall and an egg that breaks against it, no matter how right the wall or how wrong the egg, I will stand on the side of the egg. Why? Because each of us is an egg, a unique soul enclosed in a fragile egg. Each of us is confronting a high wall. The high wall is the system which forces us to do the things we would not ordinarily see fit to do as individuals . . . We are all human beings, individuals, fragile eggs. We have no hope against the wall: it's too high, too dark, too cold. To fight the wall, we must join our souls together for warmth, strength. We must not let the system control us -- create who we are. It is we who created the system. (Jerusalem Prize acceptance speech, JERUSALEM POST, Feb. 15, 2009)

It is cognition that is the fantasy.... Everything I tell you now is mere words. Arrange them and rearrange them as I might, I will never be able to explain to you the form of Will... My explanation would only show the correlation between myself and that Will by means of a correlation on the verbal level. The negation of cognition thus correlates to the negation of language. For when those two pillars of Western humanism, individual cognition and evolutionary continuity, lose their meaning, language loses meaning. Existence ceases for the individuum as we know it, and all becomes chaos. You cease to be a unique entity unto yourself, but exist simply as chaos. And not just the chaos that is you; your chaos is also my chaos. To wit, existence is communication, and communication, existence.

Aomame raised her glass to the moon and asked, “Have you gone to bed with someone in your arms lately?” The moon did not answer. “Do you have any friends?” she asked. The moon did not answer. “Don’t you get tired of always playing it cool?” The moon did not answer.

They say it's a dangerous experiment to include dreams (actual dreams or otherwise) in the fiction you write. Only a handful of writers - and I'm talking the most talented - are able to pull off the irrational synthesis you find in dreams.

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.

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

He would eventually have to pass through the forest, but he felt no fear. Of course - the forest was inside him, he knew, and it made him who he was.

The third dream was hard to put into words. It was a rambling, incoherent dream without any setting. All that was there was a feeling of being in motion. Aomame was ceaselessly moving through time and space It didn't matter when or where this was All that mattered was this movement. Everything was fluid, and a specific meaning was born of that fluidity. But as she gave herself up to it, she found her body growing transparent. She could see through her hands to the other side. Her bones, organs, and womb became visible. At this rate she might very well no longer exist. After she could no longer see herself, Aomame wondered what could possibly come then. She had no answer.

Anyone who falls in love is searching for the missing pieces of themselves. So anyone who's in love gets sad when they think of their lover. It's like stepping back inside a room you have fond memories of, one you haven't seen in a long time.

She lived frugally, but her meals were the only things on which she deliberately spent her money. She never compromised on the quality of her groceries, and drank only good-quality wines.

As I suspect is true of many who write for a living, as I write I think about all sorts of things. I don't necessarily write down what I'm thinking; it's just that as I write I think about things. As I write, I arrange my thoughts. And rewriting and revising takes my thinking down even deeper paths.

A deaf composer's like a cook who's lost his sense of taste. A frog that's lost its webbed feet. A truck driver with his license revoked. That would throw anybody for a loop, don't you think? But Beethoven didn't let it get to him. Sure, he must have been a little depressed at first, but he didn't let misfortune get him down. It was like, Problem? What problem? He composed more than ever and came up with better music than anything he'd ever written. I really admire the guy. Like this Archduke Trio--he was nearly deaf when he wrote it, can you believe it? What I'm trying to say is, it must be tough on you not being able to read, but it's not the end of the world. You might not be able to read, but there are things only you can do. That's what you gotta focus on--your strengths. Like being able to talk with the stone.

I look around me sometimes and I get sick to my stomach. Why the hell don't these bastards do something? I wonder. They don't do a damn thing, and then they bitch.

In ancient times people weren't just male or female, but one of three types: male/male, male/female, or female/female. In other words, each person was made out of the components of two people. Everyone was happy with this arrangement and never really gave it much thought. But then God took a knife and cut everybody in half, right down the middle. So after that the world was divided just into male and female, the upshot being that people spend their time running around trying to locate their missing other half.

I think of human existence as being like a two-story house. On the rst oor people gather together to take their meals, watch television, and talk. e second oor contains private chambers, bedrooms where people go to read books, listen to music by themselves, and so on. en there is a basement;this is a special place, and there are a number of things stored here. We don’t use this room much in our daily life, but some- times we come in, vaguely hang around the place. en, my thought is that underneath that basement room is yet another basement room. is one has a very special door, very di - cult to gure out, and normally you can’t get in there—some people never get in at all. . . . You go in, wander about in the darkness, and experience things there you wouldn’t see in the normal parts of the house. You connect with your past there, because you have entered into your own soul. But then you come back. If you stay over there for long you can never get back to reality.

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

But still," Ayumi said, "it seems to me that this world has a serious shortage of both logic and kindness.""You may be right," Aomame said, "But it's too late to trade it in for another one.

Were the stars out when I left the house last evening? All I could remember was the couple in the Skyline listening to Duran Duran. Stars? Who remembers stars? Come to think of it, had I even looked up at the sky recently? Had the stars been wiped out of the sky three months ago, I wouldn't have known. The only things I noticed were silver bracelets on women's wrists and popsicle sticks in potted rubber plants. There had to be something wrong with my life. I should have been born a Yugoslavian shepherd who looked up at the Big Dipper every night. No car, no car stereo, no silver bracelets, no shuffling, no dark blue tweed suits.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.My first circuit must have been wearing thin. My real memories were receding into planar projection, the screen of consciousness losing all identity.

No matter how much suffering you went through, you never wanted to let go of those memories.

As soon as I sat down across from her, she ordered me to put the entire contents of my pants pockets on the table. I did as I was told, saying nothing. My reality seemed to have left me and was now wandering around nearby. I hope it can find me, I thought.

And I really wanted to see you, too," she said. "When I couldn’t see you any more, I realized that. It was as clear as if the planets all of a sudden lined up in a row for me. I really need you. You’re a part of me; I’m a part of you.

I'm alone inside the world of the story, my favorite feeling in the world.

Time does not expand.""But time is actually expanding, isn't it? You yourself said that time adds up.""That's only because time needed for transit has decreased. The sum total of time doesn't change. It's only that you can see more movies.

Nights without work I spent with whisky and books.

In the name of God, they stole her time and her freedom, putting shackles on her heart. They preached about God's kindness, but preached twice as much about his wrath and intolerance.

Precipitate as weather, she appeared from somewhere then evaporated, leaving only memory.

Everybody thinks I'm this delicate little girl.

I mean, public libraries like this one were always short of money, so building even the tiniest of labyrinths had to be beyond their means.

Loneliness becomes an acid that eats away at you.

But even so, every now and then I would feel a violent stab of loneliness. The very water I drink, the very air I breathe, would feel like long, sharp needles. The pages of a book in my hands would take on the threatening metallic gleam of razor blades. I could hear the roots of loneliness creeping through me when the world was hushed at four o'clock in the morning.

With jealousy, a parasite takes root in your heart. It becomes a cancer that eats away at your soul.