Quotes from Haruki Murakami

Whether in music or in fiction, the most basic thing is rhythm. Your style needs to have good, natural, steady rhythm, or people won't keep reading your work.

When I look back at myself at age twenty, what I remember most is being alone and lonely. I had no girlfriend to warm my body or my soul, no friends I could open up to. No clue what I should do every day, no vision for the future. For the most part, I remained hidden away, deep within myself. Sometimes, I'd go a week without talking to anybody.

My father always told me: 'Give somebody a hand and he'll take an arm.

I saw that she was crying. Before I knew it, I was kissing her. Others on the platform were staring at us, but I didn't care about such things anymore. We were alive, she and I. And all we had to think about was continuing to live.

This was his favorite time of day, reading to his heart's content before going to sleep. When he tired of reading, he would fall asleep.

Tengo could hardly believe it-- that in this frantic, labyrinth-like world, two people's hearts-- a boy's and a girl's-- could be connected, unchanged, even though they hadn't seen each other for twenty years.

I just put my heart into it. That's the difference. It's a question of attitude. If you really work at something, you can do it, up to a point. If you really work at being happy, you can do it, up to a point...Anything more than that is luck.

It's not just that I'm dumb. Nakata's empty inside. I finally understand that. Nakata's like a library without a single book. It wasn't always like that. I used to have books inside me. For a long time I couldn't remember, but now I can. I used to be normal, just like everybody else. But something happened and I ended up like a container with nothing inside.

There's that kind of money in the world. It aggravates you to have it, makes you miserable to spend it, and you hate yourself when it's gone. And when you hate yourself, you feel like spending money. Except there's no money left. And no hope.

I learned that realism can come in all shapes and sizes. The world is big enough for different values to coexist.

Where there is light, there must be shadow, and where there is shadow there must be light. There is no shadow without light and no light without shadow.

Of course you keep telling yourself there's something to be learned from everything, and growing old shouldn't be that hard. That's the general drift.

What a terrible thing it is to wound someone you really care for--and to do it so unconsciously.

If something came out of the deal, it couldn't make things any worse for us than they already were, I thought. But I couldn't have been more wrong. Hell has no true bottom.

Every time you see a flood like that on the news you tell yourself: That's it. That's my heart.

People with dark hearts have dark dreams. Those whose hearts are even darker can't dream at all.

The unwaking world was as hushed as a deep forest.

It seems as if, year after year, the world becomes a more difficult place to live.

Certain kinds of knowledge rob people of their sleep.

The silence lent a faint weight to the air. As though I were sitting alone, at the bottom of the sea.

Quando la tempesta sarà finita, probabilmente non saprai neanche tu come hai fatto ad attraversarla e a uscirne vivo. Anzi, non sarai neanche sicuro se sia finita per davvero. Ma su un punto non c'è dubbio... Ed è che tu, uscito da quel vento, non sarai lo stesso che vi è entrato.

A certain kind of shittiness, a certain kind of stagnation, a certain kind of darkness, goes on propagating itself by its own power in its own self-contained cycle. And once it passes a certain point, no one can stop it-even if the person himself wants to stop it.

I basically have nothing to offer to others. If you think about it, I don't even have anything to offer myself.

The silence is so deep it hurts our ears