Quotes from Haruki Murakami

Find me now. Before someone else does.

What we seek is some kind of compensation for what we put up with.

One heart is not connected to another through harmony alone. They are, instead, linked deeply through their wounds. Pain linked to pain, fragility to fragility. There is no silence without a cry of grief, no forgiveness without bloodshed, no acceptance without a passage through acute loss. That is what lies at the root of true harmony.

So what's wrong if there happens to be one guy in the world who enjoys trying to understand you?

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.

Body cells replace themselves every month. Even at this very moment. Most everything you think you know about me is nothing more than memories.

We're both looking at the same moon, in the same world. We're connected to reality by the same line. All I have to do is quietly draw it towards me.

Each person feels pain in his own way, each has his own scars.

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

I'm not so weird to me.

In a place far away from anyone or anywhere, I drifted off for a moment.

Sometimes I get real lonely sleeping with you.

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.

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

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.

Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional. Say you're running and you think, 'Man, this hurts, I can't take it anymore. The 'hurt' part is an unavoidable reality, but whether or not you can stand anymore is up to the runner himself.

For a long time, she held a special place in my heart. I kept this special place just for her, like a Reserved sign on a quiet corner table in a restaurant. Despite the fact that I was sure I'd never see her again.

She's letting out her feelings. The scary thing is not being able to do that. When your feelings build up and harden and die inside, then you're in big trouble.

Something inside me had dropped away, and nothing came in to fill the cavern.

Things outside you are projections of what's inside you, and what's inside you is a projection of what's outside. So when you step into the labyrinth outside you, at the same time you're stepping into the labyrinth inside.

In a sense, I'm the one who ruined me: I did it myself.

Adults constantly raise the bar on smart children, precisely because they're able to handle it. The children get overwhelmed by the tasks in front of them and gradually lose the sort of openness and sense of accomplishment they innately have. When they're treated like that, children start to crawl inside a shell and keep everything inside. It takes a lot of time and effort to get them to open up again. Kids' hearts are malleable, but once they gel it's hard to get them back the way they were.

The sense of tragedy - according to Aristotle - comes, ironically enough, not from the protagonist's weak points but from his good qualities. Do you know what I'm getting at? People are drawn deeper into tragedy not by their defects but by their virtues. ... [But] we accept irony through a device called metaphor. And through that we grow and become deeper human beings.

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.