Quotes from Haruki Murakami

Things may look different to you than they did before. I've had that experience myself. But don't let appearances fool you. There's only one reality.

All things pass. None of us can manage to hold on to anything. In that way, we live our lives.

At least he never walked.

You live by yourself for a stretch of time and you get to staring at different objects. Sometimes you talk to yourself. You take meals in crowded joints. You develop an intimate relationship with your used Subaru. You slowly but surely become a has-been.

You know what it's like when you're trying to fall asleep and it only makes you more wide awake?

I want to believe you, but if that's true, I just don't get it. Why does loving somebody mean you have to hurt them just as much? I mean, if that's the way it goes, what's the point of loving someone?

Her voice was like a line from an old black-and-white Jean-Luc Godard movie, filtering in just beyond the frame of my consciousness.

The little things are important, Mr. Wind-Up Bird

There's nothing wrong with not looking like something. It just means you don't fit the stereotype yet.

It's precisely because of the pain, the we can get the feeling, through this process, of really being alive—or at least a partial sense of it.

That's all I think about these days. Must be because I have so much time to kill every day. When you don't have anything to do, your thoughts get really, really far out-so far out you can't follow them all the way to the end.

Maybe working on the little things as dutifully and honestly as we can is how we stay sane when the world is falling apart.

I sometimes think that people's hearts are like deep wells. Nobody knows what's at the bottom. All you can do is imagine by what comes floating to the surface every once in a while. Its only confusing if you believe it has to make sense.

Look deep enough into any person and you will find something shining within.

A girl doesn't always want to go out, you know, Mr. Wind-Up Bird. Sometimes she feels like being nasty--like, if the guy's gonna wait, let him really wait.

Our responsibility begins with our imagination.

People want to be bowled over by something special. Nine times out of ten you might strike out, but that tenth time, that peak experience, is what people want. That's what can move the world. That's art.

Waves of thought are stirring. In a twilight corner of her consciousness, one tiny fragment and another tiny fragment call out wordlessly to eachother, their spreading ripples intermingling.

Have books 'happened' to you? Unless your answer to that question is 'yes,' I'm unsure how to talk to you

All right, then, I thought: here I am in the bottom of a well.

This was never any place I was meant to be. This isn't a place for me.

I'm me, and at the same time not me. That's what it felt like. A very still, quiet feeling.

How can I put this? There's a king of gap between what I think is real and what's really real. I get this feeling like some kind of little something-or-other is there, somewhere inside me... like a burglar is in the house, hiding in a wardrobe... and it comes out every once in a while and messes up whatever order or logic I've established for myself. The way a magnet can make a machine go crazy.

My point is: in this whole wide world the only person you can depend on is you.