Quotes from Haruki Murakami

And as the years have passed, the time has grown longer. The sad truth is that what I could recall in five seconds all too needed ten, then thirty, then a full minute - like shadows lengthening at dusk. Someday, I suppose, the shadows will be swallowed up in darkness.

Her pupils have taken on a lonely hue, like grey clouds reflected in a calm lake.

It's all a question of imagination. Our responsibility begins with the power to imagine. It's just as Yeats said: In dreams begin responsibility. Turn this on its head and you could say that where there's no power to imagine, no responsibility can arise. Just as we see with Eichmann.

To be able to talk to your heart's content about a book you like with someone who feels the same way about it is one of the greatest joys that life can offer.

No matter what you tell me, no matter how legitimate your reasons, I can never just forget about you, I can never push the years we spent together out of my mind. I can't do it because it really happened, they are part of my life, and there is no way I can just erase them. That would be the same as erasing my own self.

She lived frugally, but her meals were the only things on which she deliberately spent her money. She never compromised on the quality of her groceries, and drank only good-quality wines.

There had to be something wrong with my life. I should have been born a Yugoslavian shepherd who looked up at the Big Dipper every night.

As I gazed at my reflection I wondered, Where am I headed? Before that, though, the question was Where have I come to? Where is this place? No, before that even I needed to ask, Who the hell am I?

But still, Ayumi said, it seems to me that this world has a serious shortage of both logic and kindness. You may be right, Aomame said, But it's too late to trade it in for another one.

A fire can be any shape it wants to be. It's free. So it can look like anything at all, depending on what's inside the person looking at it. If you get this deep, quiet kind of feeling when you look at a fire, that's because it's showing you the deep, quiet kind of feeling you have inside yourself...

That's the kind of death that frightens me. The shadow of death slowly, slowly eats away at the region of life, and before you know it everything's dark and you can't see, and the people around you think of you as more dead than alive.

You make do with what you have. As you age you learn even to be happy with what you have.

How about Proust's In Search of Lost Time? Tamaru asked. If you've never read it this would be a good opportunity to read the whole thing. Have you read it? No, I haven't been in jail, or had to hide out for a long time. Someone once said unless you have those kinds of opportunities, you can't read the whole of Proust.

I can never say what I want to say, it's been like this for a while now. I try to say something but all I get are wrong words - the wrong words or the exact opposite words from what I mean. I try to correct myself, and that only makes it worse. I lose track of what I was trying to say to begin with. It's like I'm split in two and playing tag with myself. One half is chasing this big, fat post. The other me has the right words, but this can't catch her.

When I was little, I had this science book. There was a section on 'What would happen to the world if there was no friction?' Answer: 'Everything on earth would fly into space from the centrifugal force of revolution.' That was my mood.

A deserted library in the morning - there's something about it that really gets to me. All possible words and ideas are there, resting peacefully.

But knowing what I don't want to do doesn't help me figure out what I do want to do. I could do just about anything if somebody made me. But I don't have an image of the one thing I really want to do. That's my problem now. I can't find the image.

Everything was too sharp and clear, so that I could never tell where to start- the way a map that shows too much can sometimes be useless.

In the deepening spring of May, I had no choice but to recognize the trembling of my heart. It usually happened as the sun was going down. In the pale evening gloom, when the soft fragrance of magnolias hung in the air, my heart would swell without warning, and tremble, and lurch with a stab of pain. I would try clamping my eyes shut and gritting my teeth, and wait for it to pass. And it would pass –but slowly, taking its own time, and leaving a dull ache behind.

As long as I kept my body moving I could forget about the emptiness inside.

Things pass us by. Nobody can catch them. That's the way we live our lives.

But it has finally hit me: she is neither a concept nor a symbol nor a metaphor. She actually exists: she has warm flesh and a spirit that moves. I never should have lost sight of that warmth and that movement.

I wrote a huge number of letters that spring: one a week to Naoko, several to Reiko, and several more to Midori. 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.

This may be the most important proposition revealed by history: At the time, no one knew what was coming.