Quotes from Haruki Murakami

Where Watanabe and I are alike is we don't give a damn if nobody understands us… That's what makes us different from everybody else. They're all worried about whether the people around them understand them. But not me, and not Watanabe. We just don't give a damn. Self and others are separate.

Ogni persona agisce basandosi su dei criteri propri. Nessun essere umano è uguale a un altro. È un problema di identità insomma. Ma che cos'è l'identità? È l'originalità del sistema di pensiero basato sull'insieme dei ricordi delle esperienze passate. Più semplicemente la si può chiamare lo spirito. Non esistono due persone con lo stesso spirito.

Trouble is we end up being worse at saying things well. It's got to be an inborn fault. Naturally, everyone's got faults. My biggest fault is that the faults i was born with grow bigger each year.

You're very clear about what you like and what you don't like, she said. Maybe so, I said. Maybe that's why people don't like me. Never have. It's because you show it, she said. You make it obvious you don't care whether people like you or not. That makes some people angry.

He had no place he had to go to, no place to come back to. He never did, and he didn't now. The only place for him was where he was now.

It just happens to be the way I'm made. I have to write things down to feel I fully comprehend them.

But my one-day absence was probably not having an effect on anybody. Not one human being had noticed that I was gone, likely. I could disappear from the face of the earth, and the world would go on moving without the slightest twinge. Things were tremendously complicated, to be sure, but one thing was clear: no one needed me.

The gears of life had moved ahead a notch with a loud ker-chunk, and Junpei knew that they would never turn back again.

Yeah. The more languages you know the better. And I've got a knack for them. I taught myself French and it's practically perfect. Languages are like games. You learn the rules for one, and they all work the same way. Like women.

I turn a corner, I offered, just as someone ahead of me turns the next corner. I can't see what that person looks like. All I can make out is a flash of white coattails. But the whiteness of the coattails is indelibly etched in my consciousness. Ever get that feeling?

Por qué me miras tan fijamente? -me preguntaba. -Porque eres bonita -respondía yo. -Eres la primera persona que me lo dice. -Es que yo soy el único que lo sabe.

All I know is I'm totally alone. All alone i n an unfamiliar place, like some solitary explorer who's lost his compass and his map. Is this what it means to be free? I don't know, and I give up thinking about it.

The image of her in another man's arms was stuck in my mind, as real as life. As if there was a demon with nowhere else to go clinging to a corner of the ceiling, eyes fastened on me.

As far as I could see, she had no opinion at all about anything that was not set directly in front of her (and in fact, she was extremely nearsighted).

The world would be a real mess if everybody was a genius. Somebody's got to keep watch, take care of business.

The number of people who could deliver a kick to the balls with Aomame's mastery must have been few indeed. She had studied kick patterns with great diligence and never missed her daily practice.

I'll never forget you, I said. I could never forget you.

No matter how much I scream at them to make my toast as crispy as possible, I have never once gotten it the way I want it. I can't imagine why. What with Japanese industriousness and high-tech culture and the market principles that the Denny's chain is always pursuing, it shouldn't be that hard to get crispy toast, don't you think? So, why can't they do it? Of what value is a civilization that can't toast a piece of bread as ordered?

I straightened up and looked out the plane window at the dark clouds hanging over the North Sea, thinking of what I had lost in the course of my life: times gone forever, friends who had died or disappeared, feelings I would never know again.

The bottle and the cap don't fit: is the problem with the bottle or the cap?

No, even I know better than that. I'm looking for selfishness. Perfect selfishness.

Better to know a little, I figure, than nothing at all.

We don't find out what's waiting for us around the next corner until we turn it.

The cook hates the waiter, and they both hate the customer," Haida said. "A line from the Arnold Wesker play The Kitchen. People whose freedom is taken away always end up hating somebody. Right? I know I don't want to live like that.