Quotes from Haruki Murakami

They were each like a mirror for the other, reflecting the changes in themselves.

You can't keep counting forever

It was spring break, so the theater was always packed with high schools students. It was an animal house. I wanted to burn the place down.

I learned there were lots of realities in the world.

On any given day, something can come along and steal our hearts. It may be any old thing: a rosebud, a lost cap, a favorite sweater from childhood, an old Gene Pitney record. A miscellany of trivia with no home to call their own. Lingering for two or three days, that something soon disappears, returning to the darkness. There are wells, deep wells, dug in our hearts. Birds fly over them. -from Pinball, 1973

Es una lástima, pero hay cosas que no pueden volver atrás. Una vez has dado un paso hacia delante, por más que lo intentes, ya no puedes retroceder. Si se estropean, así se quedan para siempre.

It was not one of those strong, impulsive feelings that can hit two people like an electric shock when they first meet, but something quieter and gentler, like two tiny lights traveling in tandem through a vast darkness and drawing imperceptibly closer to each other as they go.

I know exactly what I'm doing, but I just can't stop. That's my greatest weakness.

I spend more time being confused than not," I answered.

If you listen carefully, you can hear these things. If you look carefully, you'll see what you're after

He was glad to be human. For sure, it was a great inconvenience to have to walk on two legs and wear clothes. There were so many things he didn't know. Yet had he been a fish or a sunflower, and not a human being, he might never have experienced this emotion.

Everybody burns out in this world; amateur, pro, it doesn't matter, they all burn out, they all get hurt, the OK guys and the not-OK guys both. That's why everybody takes out a little insurance. I've got some too, here at the bottom of the heap. That way, you manage to survive if you burn out. If you're all by yourself and don't belong anywhere, you go down once, and you're out. Finished.

We all die and disappear, but that's because the mechanism of the world itself is built on destruction and loss.

Her partially open lips now opened wide, and her soft, fragrant tongue entered his mouth, where it began a relentless search for unformed words, for a secret code engraved there. Tengo's own tongue responded unconsciously to this movement and soon their tongues were like two young snakes in a spring meadow, newly wakened from their hibernation and hungrily intertwining, each led on by the other's scent.

Not prejudging things, listening to what's going on, keeping your ears, heart, and mind open.

But if you peeled away the ornamental egos that she had built, there was only an abyss of nothingness and the intense thirst that came with it.

Pensar libremente es distanciarse del cuerpo. Salir de esa jaula que te limita. Romper las cadenas y simplemente darle alas a la mente.

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 waiting for it to pass. And it would pass -- but slowly, taking its own time, and leaving a dull ache behind.

And it was the kind of thing that loses the most important nuances when reduced to words. He had never told anyone about it, and he probably never would.

Anyway, I'm in bed with her, with her bracelets. Her face is a blank, so I darken the lights. Off go her silky undergarments. The bracelets are all she has on. They glint slightly, a pleasant muffled clinking on the sheets. I have a hard-on. Which, halfway down the ladder, is what I noticed. Just great. Why now? Why didn't I get an erection when I needed one? And why was I getting so excited over two lousy bracelets? Especially under this slicker, with the world about to end.

If people aren't equal, where would you fit in?

Tomorrow is tomorrow. Today is all we have right now.

I can feel the limits of what humans are capable of -- that a certain type of perfection can only be realized through a limitless accumulation of the imperfect...I find that encouraging.

You know something? she said. What? I'm completely empty. Yeah? Yeah.