Quotes from Haruki Murakami

I'm not going to believe in any damned revolution. Love is all I'm going to believe in.

En este mundo existe un tipo de tristeza que no te permite verter lágrimas. Es una de esas cosas que no puedes explicar a nadie y, aunque pudieras, nadie te comprendería. Y esa tristeza, sin cambiar de forma, va acumulándose en silencio en tu corazón como la nieve durante una noche sin viento.

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.

Pills and fortune-telling and dieting: nobody can stop her when it comes to any of those things.

Some things in life are too complicated to explain in any language. Olga was absolutely right, Tsukuru thought as he sipped his wine. Not just to explain to others, but to explain to yourself. Force yourself to try to explain it, and you create lies.

They both loved piano music and were convinced that Beethoven's Sonata No. 32 was the absolute pinnacle in the history of music. And that Wilhelm Backhaus's unparalleled performance of the sonata for Decca set the interpretive standard.

Most of these university types are total phonies. They're scared to death somebody's gonna find out they don't know something. They all read the same books and they all throw around the same words, and they get off listening to John Coltrane and seeing Pasolini movies.

People devote a lot of energy to thinking about things. Whether they want to or not. Yet in the end we all just have to wait - only time can tell how events play out. The answers lie ahead.

Lo correcto, ¿qué diablos significa eso? ¿Me lo puedes explicar? A decir verdad, no sé muy bien qué es lo correcto. Lo que no es correcto sí lo sé, pero lo correcto, ¿qué es?

So called art films. Movies like that never explained what was going on. Explanations were rejected as some kind of evil that could only destroy the films reality.

Astrud Gilberto sang an old bossa nova song. "Take me to Aruanda," she sang. I closed my eyes, and the clatter of the cups and saucers sounded like the roar of a far-off sea. Aruanda—what's it like there?

Speaking frankly and speaking the truth are two different things entirely. Honesty is to truth as prow is to stern. Honesty appears first and truth appears last. The interval between varies in direct proportion to the size of ship. With anything of size, truth takes a long time in coming. Sometimes it only manifests itself posthumously. Therefore, should I impart you with no truth at this juncture, that is through no fault of mine. Nor yours.

He was the type of man who had his own sense of logic and reached his own conclusions without regard to the opinions of others.

Sumire frowned and sighed. "If they invent a car that runs on stupid jokes, you could go far.

There we were, sitting quietly on the edge of the world, and no one could see us. I just wanted to stay this way forever. I knew that was impossible – our life here was just a momentary illusion, and someday reality would yank us back to the world we came from.

The wakefulness was always there beside me. I could feel its chilling shadow. It was the shadow of myself. Weird, I would think as the drowsiness overtook me, I'm in my own shadow. I would walk and eat and talk to people inside my drowsiness.

Unsure how to answer, I took another grape. Time was no problem for me, but I wasn't eager to hear the long life story of a dwarf. And besides, this was a dream. It could evaporate any moment.

sometimes in life we can't grasp the boundary between reality and unreality. That boundary always seems to be shifting. As if the border between countries shifts from one day to the next depending on their mood. We need to pay close attention to that movement, otherwise we won't know which side we're on.

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

He had no itch to dig for glories Deep in the dirt that time has laid.

A gentleman doesn't talk much about the taxes he paid, or the women he sleeps with.

I decided to go swimming. I don't know how to explain this, but I wanted to purge my body of something by exercising it to the limit. Purge it—of what? I spent some time wondering about that. Purge it of what? I didn't know.

When I open them, most of the books have the smell of an earlier time leaking out from between their pages – a special odour of the knowledge and emotions that for ages have been calmly resting between the covers>

O sentimento era de esperança, misturado com uma série de outras emoções - excitação, resignação, confusão, medo -, e tanto interrompia de repente como acabava por esmorecer. Como quando somos arrebatados por um súbito optimismo, para logo a seguir termos a certeza de que tudo irá acabar mal. E é quase sempre o que acaba por acontecer.