Quotes from Haruki Murakami

But why should you be interested in me? Good question. I can't explain it myself right this moment. But maybe – just maybe – if we start getting together and talking, after a while something like Francis Lai's soundtrack music will start playing in the background, and a whole slew of concrete reasons why I'm interested in you will line up out of nowhere. With luck, it might even snow for us.

Death was not the opposite of life. It was already here, within my being, it had always been here, and no struggle would permit me to forget that.

I think that my job is to observe people and the world, and not to judge them. I always hope to position myself away from so-called conclusions. I would like to leave everything wide open to all the possibilities in the world.

Kumiko and I felt something for each other from the beginning. It was not one of those strong, impulsive feelings that can hit two people like an electric shock when they first meet, but something quieter and gentler, like two tiny lights traveling in tandem through a vast darkness and drawing imperceptibly closer to each other as they go. As our meetings grew more frequent, I felt not so much that I had met someone new as that I had chanced upon a dear old friend.

Life is so uncertain: you never know what could happen. One way to deal with that is to keep your pajamas washed.

I wonder what ants do on rainy days?

Time expands, then contracts, all in tune with the stirrings of the heart.

With my eyes closed, I would touch a familiar book and draw its fragrance deep inside me. This was enough to make me happy.

It's just that you're about to do something out of the ordinary. And after you do something like that, the everyday look of things might seem to change a little. Things may look different to you than they did before. But don't let appearances fool you. There's always only one reality.

Deep rivers run quiet.

Never let fear and stupid pride make you lose someone who's precious to you.

Please remember: things are not what they seem.

People fall in love without reason, without even wanting to. You can't predict it. That's love.

Hey, what is it with you? Why are you so spaced out? You still haven't answered me. I probably still haven't completely adapted to the world, I said after giving it some thought. I don't know, I feel like this isn't the real world. The people, the scene: they just don't seem real to me. Midori rested an elbow on the bar and looked at me. There was something like that in a Jim Morrison song, I'm pretty sure. People are strange when you're a stranger.

I've built a wall around me, never letting anybody inside and trying not to venture outside myself

I go back to the reading room, where I sink down in the sofa and into the world of The Arabian Nights. Slowly, like a movie fadeout, the real world evaporates. I'm alone, inside the world of the story. My favourite feeling in the world.

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.

What we call the present is given shape by an accumulation of the past.

By living our lives, we nurture death. True as this might be, it was only one of the truths we had to learn. What I learned from Naoko's death was this: no truth can cure the sorrow we feel from losing a loved one. No truth, no sincerity, no strength, no kindness can cure that sorrow. All we can do is see it through to the end and learn something from it, but what we learn will be no help in facing the next sorrow that comes to us without warning.

But if something did happen, it happened. Whether it's right or wrong. I accept everything that happens, and that's how I became the person I am now.

We survived. You and I. And those who survive have a duty. Our duty is to do our best to keep on living. Even if our lives are not perfect.

Love can rebuild the world, they say, so everything's possible when it comes to love.

Sometimes taking time is actually a shortcut.

In certain areas of my life, I actively seek out solitude. Especially for someone in my line of work, solitude is, more or less, an inevitable circumstance. Sometimes, however, this sense of isolation, like acid spilling out of a bottle, can unconsciously eat away at a person's heart and dissolve it. You could see it, too, as a kind of double-edged sword. It protects me, but at the same time steadily cuts away at me from the inside.