Quotes from Haruki Murakami

I'm a very ordinary human being; I just happen to like reading books.

Memories and thoughts age, just as people do. But certain thoughts can never age, and certain memories can never fade.

No matter how far you travel, you can never get away from yourself.

So the fact that I'm me and no one else is one of my greatest assets. Emotional hurt is the price a person has to pay in order to be independent.

It is not that the meaning cannot be explained. But there are certain meanings that are lost forever the moment they are explained in words.

What do you think? I'm not a starfish or a pepper tree. I'm a living, breathing human being. Of course I've been in love.

What makes us the most normal, said Reiko, is knowing that we're not normal.

Even if we could turn back, we'd probably never end up where we started.

I'm tired of living unable to love anyone. I don't have a single friend - not one. And, worst of all, I can't even love myself. Why is that? Why can't I love myself? It's because I can't love anyone else. A person learns how to love himself through the simple acts of loving and being loved by someone else. Do you understand what I am saying? A person who is incapable of loving another cannot properly love himself.

I don't care what you do to me, but I don't want you to hurt me. I've had enough hurt already in my life. More than enough. Now I want to be happy.

I realize full well how hard it must be to go on living alone in a place from which someone has left you, but there is nothing so cruel in this world as the desolation of having nothing to hope for.

Being with her I feel a pain, like a frozen knife stuck in my chest. An awful pain, but the funny thing is I'm thankful for it. It's like that frozen pain and my very existence are one. The pain is an anchor, mooring me here.

When you come out of the storm, you won't be the same person who walked in. That's what this storm's all about.

It's hard to tell the difference between sea and sky, between voyager and sea. Between reality and the workings of the heart.

The sky grew darker, painted blue on blue, one stroke at a time, into deeper and deeper shades of night.

People leave strange little memories of themselves behind when they die.

Time weighs down on you like an old, ambiguous dream. You keep on moving, trying to sleep through it. But even if you go to the ends of the earth, you won't be able to escape it. Still, you have to go there- to the edge of the world. There's something you can't do unless you get there.

I didn't have much to say to anybody but kept to myself and my books. With my eyes closed, I would touch a familiar book and draw it's fragrance deep inside me. This was enough to make me happy.

I said nothing for a time, just ran my fingertips along the edge of the human-shaped emptiness that had been left inside me.

You can hide memories, but you can't erase the history that produced them.

You can keep as quiet as you like, but one of these days somebody is going to find you.

I was always attracted not by some quantifiable, external beauty, but by something deep down, something absolute. Just as some people have a secret love for rainstorms, earthquakes, or blackouts, I liked that certain undefinable something directed my way by members of the opposite sex. For want of a better word, call it magnetism. Like it or not, it's a kind of power that snares people and reels them in.

If you can't understand it without an explanation, you can't understand it with an explanation.

If you think God's there, He is. If you don't, He isn't. And if that's what God's like, I wouldn't worry about it.