Quotes from Haruki Murakami

It's basically impossible for everybody's justice to prevail or everybody's happiness to triumph, so chaos takes over.

You can hide memories, but you can't erase the history that produced them.

I think history is collective memories. In writing, I'm using my own memory, and I'm using my collective memory.

There is nothing so cruel in this world as the desolation of having nothing to hope for.

Only where there is disillusionment and depression and sorrow does happiness arise; without the despair of loss, there is no hope.

Our responsibility begins with our imagination.

My imagination is a kind of animal. So what I do is keep it alive.

Kids' hearts are malleable, but once they gel it's hard to get them back the way they were.

Learning another language is like becoming another person.

Dreaming is the day job of novelists, but sharing our dreams is a still more important task for us. We cannot be novelists without this sense of sharing something.

Something will work out tomorrow, I thought. And if not, then tomorrow I'll do some thinking. Ob—la-di, ob-la-da, life goes on.

I know how fiction matters to me, because if I want to express myself, I have to make up a story. Some people call it imagination. To me, it's not imagination. It's just a way of watching.

If you cannot concentrate, you are not so happy.

It feels good to think about you when I'm warm in bed. I feel as if you're curled up there beside me, fast asleep. And I think how great it would be if it were true.

I'm kind of a big kettle. It takes time to get boiled, but then I'm always hot.

I'll never see them again. I know that. And they know that. And knowing this, we say farewell.

No matter what form the relationship might take, he was the only person she could picture sharing her life with.

The very thought of such people's intolerant worldview, their inflated sense of self superiority, and their callous imposition of their own beliefs on others was enough to fill her with rage.

There's an essential order you have to follow in everything. It's a way of showing respect, following everything in the correct order.

Find me now. Before someone else does.

This is the extent of his knowledge of the sea: it was very big, it was salty, and fish lived there.

Properly speaking, should any individual ever have exact, clear knowledge of his own core consciousness?" "I wouldn't know," I said. "Nor would we," said the scientists.

Certain kinds of knowledge rob people of their sleep.

Chance encounters are what keep us going.