Quotes from Haruki Murakami

I feel like I've swallowed a cloudy sky

I am struck by how, except when you're young, you really need to prioritize in life, figuring out in what order you should divide up your time and energy. If you don't get that sort of system set by a certain age, you'll lack focus and your life will be out of balance.

My biggest fault is that the faults I was born with grow bigger each year.

In his or her own way, everyone I saw before me looked happy. Whether they were really happy or just looked it, I couldn't tell. But they did look happy on this pleasant early afternoon in late September, and because of that I felt a kind of loneliness new to me, as if I were the only one here who was not truly part of the scene.

You have to wait until tomorrow to find out what tomorrow will bring.

How many Sundays – how many hundreds of Sundays like this – lay ahead of me? "Quiet, peaceful and lonely," I said aloud to myself. On Sundays i didn't wind my spring.

Pointless thinking is worse than no thinking at all.

You know what girls are like. They turn twenty or twenty-one and all of a sudden they start having these concrete ideas. They get super realistic. And when that happens, everything that seemed so sweet and lovable about them begins to look ordinary and depressing.

An unhealthy soul requires a healthy body.

How wonderful it is to be able to write someone a letter! To feel like conveying your thoughts to a person, to sit at your desk and pick up a pen, to put your thoughts into words like this is truly marvelous.

I'm going to take you out of here ... I'm going to take you home, to the world where you belong, where cats with bent tails live, and there are little backyards, and alarm clocks ring in the morning.

I realize now that the reality of things is not something you convey to people but something you make.

Life's no piece of cake, mind you, but the recipe's my own to fool with.

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

Sometimes I feel like a caretaker of a museum -- a huge, empty museum where no one ever comes, and I'm watching over it for no one but myself.

I am living in hell from one day to the next. But there is nothing I can do to escape. I don't know where I would go if I did. I feel utterly powerless, and that feeling is my prision. I entered of my own free will, I locked the door, and I threw away the key.

Whenever I meet people for the first time, I get them to talk for ten minutes. Then I size them up from the exact opposite perspective of all they've told me. Do you think that's crazy? "No," I said, shaking my head, "I'd guess your method works quite well.

Inside that darkness, i saw rain falling on the sea. Rain softly falling on a vast sea, with no one there to see it. The rain strikes the surface of the sea, yet even the fish don't know it is raining.

I want to write about people who dream and wait for the night to end, who long for the light so they can hold the ones they love.

What I was chasing in circles must have been the tail of the darkness inside me.

Once thing goes wrong, then the whole house of cards collapses. And there's no way you can extricate yourself. Until someone comes along to drag you out.

After all this, I won't start to hate you.

The fresh smell of coffee soon wafted through the apartment, the smell that separates night from day.

I have a lot more patience for others than I have for myself, and I'm much better at bringing out the best in others than in myself. That's just the kind of person I am. I'm the scratchy stuff on the side of the matchbox. But that's fine with me. I don't mind at all. Better to be a first-class matchbox than a second-class match.