Quotes from Haruki Murakami

Things like this don't happen all that often in one lifetime. This is the magnificent world of a picaresque novel. Just brace yourself and enjoy the smell of evil. We're shooting the rapids. And when we go over the falls, let's do it together in grand style!

Nothingness means there's absolutely nothing, so maybe there's no need to understand it or imagine it.

In any case, I wrote, I've decided to make myself strong. As far as I can tell, that's all I can do.

Where there's an entrance, there's got to be an exit. Most things work that way.

Lady, did you ever see anyone shot by a gun without bleeding?" This film came out at the height of the Vietnam War. I love that line. That's gotta be one of the principles behind reality. Accepting things that are hard to comprehend, and leaving them that way. And bleeding. Shooting and bleeding.

Six pull-tabs lay in the ashtray like scales from a mermaid.

Maybe time is nothing at all like a straight line. Perhaps it's shaped like a twisted doughnut. But for tens of thousands of years, people have probably been seeing time as a straight line that continues on forever. And that's the concept they based their actions on. And until now they haven't found anything inconvenient or contradictory about it. So as an experiential model, it's probably correct.

Snow floated down every once in a while, but it was frail snow, like a memory fading into the distance.

Their hearts, lost in thought, slowly tick away time. When we pass each other on the road, we listen to the rhythm of each other's breathing, and sense the way the other person is ticking away the moments.

You concentrate on waiting for someone and after a certain time it hardly matters what happens anymore. It could be five years or ten years or one month. It's all the same.

To keep on going, you have to keep up the rhythm. This is the important thing for long-term projects. Once you set the pace, the rest will follow.

but I was not, in the true sense of the word, alive. I simply performed the mundane tasks that were handed to me, one after another

Do you think you weren't loved enough?" She tilted her head and looked at me. Then she gave a sharp, little nod. "Somewhere between 'not enough' and 'not at all.' I was always hungry for love. Just once, I wanted to know what it was like to get my fill of it—to be fed so much love I couldn't take any more. Just once. But they never gave that to me. Never, not once.

There was something strange about her eyes. They were mysteriously lacking in depth. They were lovely eyes, but they did not seem to be looking at anything. They were all surface, like glass eyes. But of course they were not glass eyes. They moved, and their lids blinked.

Whenever she came across lines she liked, she'd mark them in pencil and commit them to memory as if they were Holy Writ.

A regular wind-up toy world this is, I think. Once a day the wind-up bird has to come and wind the springs of this world. Alone in this fun house, only I grow old, a pale softball of death swelling inside me. Yet even as I sleep somewhere between Saturn and Uranus, wind-up birds everywhere are busy at work fulfilling their appointed rounds.

It's like watching some rare exotic butterfly. Pleasant to watch, but you can't touch it, for as soon as you do, it dies, it's brilliance gone.

Defining that special something isn't easy, but when you gazed into her eyes, you could always find it, reflected deep down inside.

One other thing I learned from working in a company was that the majority of people in the world have no problem following orders. They're actually happy to be told what to do. They might complain, but that's not how they really feel. They just grumble out of habit. If you told them to think for themselves, and make their own decisions and take responsibility for them, they'd be clueless.

Each memory was now the shadow of a shadow of a shadow. The only thing that remained tangible to him was the sense of absence.

My head is like some ridiculous barn packed full of stuff I want to write about.

Cerrar los ojos no va a cambiar nada. Nada va a desaparecer simplemente por no ver lo que está pasando. De hecho, las cosas serán aún peor la próxima vez que los abras. Sólo un cobarde cierra los ojos. Cerrar los ojos y taparse los oidos no va a hacer que el tiempo se detenga.

Robbing people of their actual history is the same as robbing them of a part of themselves. It's a crime.

Although I didn't think so at the time, things were a lot simpler in 1969. All you had to do to express yourself was throw rocks at riot police. But with today's sophistication, who's in a position to throw rocks? Who's going to brave what tear gas? C'mon, that's the way it is. Everything is rigged, tied into that massive capital web, and beyond this web there's another web. Nobody's going anywhere. You throw a rock and it'll come right back at you.