Quotes from Haruki Murakami

I was living for one thing only, and that was to confirm my own lack of feeling.

As time passes, memory, inevitably, reconstitutes itself.

In this world, there is no absolute good, no absolute evil. Good and evil are not fixed stable entities but are continually trading places. A good may be transformed into an evil in the next second. And vice versa.

No matter what we said, people would believe what they wanted to believe. The more we struggled, the more vulnerable we'd be.

But if I'm with you, I'm not afraid.

My only passions were books and music. As you might guess, I led a lonely life… Not that I knew what I wanted in life - I didn't. I loved reading novels to distraction, but didn't write well enough to be a novelist; being an editor or a critic was out, too, since my tastes ran to the extremes. Novels should be for pure personal enjoyment, I decided, not part of your work or study. That's why I didn't study literature

No one can know everything about another person. Not even God, probably.

And when it was all over, the king and his retainers burst out laughing.

Surfing's a more profound kind of sport than it looks. When you surf, you learn not to fight the power of nature, even if it gets violent.

People have to pay a price for the gifts they are given

What was I hoping to gain from this?...Was I trying to confirm the ties that make it possible for me to exist here and now. Was I hoping to be woven into some new plot, to be given some new and better defined role to play? No, he thought, that's not it. What I was chasing in circles must have been the tail of darkness inside me. I just happened to catch sight of it, and followed it, and clung to it, and in the end let it fly into still deeper darkness. I'm sure I'll never see it again.

The people who build high, strong fences are the ones who survive the best. You deny that reality only at the risk of being driven into the wilderness yourself...

No matter what they wish for, no matter how far they go, people can never be anything but themselves

Everyone of us is losing something precious to us. Lost opportunities, lost possibilities, feelings we can never get back again. That's part of what it means to be alive. But inside our heads - at least that's where I imagine it - there's a little room where we store those memories.

Despite your best effort, people are going to hurt when it's time for them to be hurt. Life is like that.

Tendencies. Yougottendencies. Soevenifyoudideverythingoveragain, yourwholelife, yougottendenciestodojustwhatyoudid, alloveragain. -The Sheep Man.

As long as an individual's alive, he will undergo experience in some form or other, and those experiences are stored up instant by instant. To stop experiencin' is to die.

But I didn't walk a single step. I stopped a lot to stretch, but I never walked. I didn't come here to walk. I came to run. That's the reason-the only reason-I flew all the way to the northern tip of Japan. No matter how slow I might run, I wasn't about to walk. That was the rule.

You keep looking at the sea and you start to miss being with people; you stay around people all the time and you just want to go look at the sea.

Alienation and loneliness became a cable that stretched hundreds of miles long, pulled to the breaking point by a gigantic winch. And through that taut line, day and night, he received indecipherable messages.

Not that running away's going to solve everything. I don't want to rain on your parade or anything, but I wouldn't count on escaping this place if I were you. No matter how far you run. Distance might not solve anything.

You're afraid of imagination. And even more afraid of dreams. Afraid of the responsibility that begins in dreams. But you have to sleep, and dreams are a part of sleep. When you're awake you can suppress imagination. But you can't suppress dreams.

If we reverse the outer shell and the essence--in other words, consider the outer shell the essence and the essence only the shell--our lives might be a whole lot easier to understand.

One last word of advice, though, Mr. Okada, though you may not want to hear this. There are things in this world it is better not to know about. Of course, those are the very things that people most want to know about. It's strange.