Quotes from Haruki Murakami

You make it obvious you don't care whether people like you or not. That makes some people angry.

We heard no other sounds. We met no other people. We saw only two bright red birds leap startled from the center of the meadow and dart into the woods.

It was the first time Junko felt a certain something as she watched the flames of a bonfire: something deep down, a wad of feeling, she might have called it, because it was too raw, too heavy, to real to be called an idea. It coursed through her body and vanished, leaving behind a sweet-sad, chest-gripping, strange sort of feeling.

To be a Russian writer at the end of the nineteenth century must have meant bearing an inescapably bitter fate. The more they tried to escape from Russia, the more deeply Russia swallowed them.

It's strange, isn't it? No matter how quiet and conformist a person's life seems, there's always a time in the past when they reached an impasse. A time when they went a little crazy.

Memories warm you up from the inside. But they also tear you apart. Nakata shook his head. "That's a tough one. Nakata still doesn't understand. The only thing I understand is the present." "I'm the exact opposite," Miss Saeki said.

By living our lives, we nurture death.

I don't want to do that," Aomame said. "What I want is for the two of us to meet somewhere by chance one day, like, passing on the street, or getting on the same bus." "Destiny. A chance encounter." "More or less," Aomame said, taking a sip of wine. "That's when I'll open up

There's something about those secrets that only the deceased person can rightly understand. Something that can't be explained, no matter how hard you try. They're what the dead person has to take with him to his grave. Like a valuable piece of luggage.

People are in constant motion, never stationary. No one knows what will happen next.

Die Leute schauen vorbei, nehmen ein paar Drinks, hören sich die Musik an, unterhalten sich und gehen dann nach Hause. Sie sind bereit, für ein paar Drinks bis hier hinauszufahren und dann noch eine Menge Geld auszugeben – und weißt du, warum? Weil jeder das gleiche sucht: einen imaginären Ort, sein eigenes Luftschloss, und darin seinen ganz besonderen privaten Winkel.

Compared to these women, isn't a woman who is not beautiful—who is even considered to be ugly—and yet enjoys that fact, a far happier person? No matter how beautiful a woman might be, she always has imperfections, and likewise no matter how ugly a woman might be, there's always a part of her that is beautiful. And they seem to freely revel in that part of themselves, unlike beautiful women. It's not a substitute for anything, or a metaphor.

It felt like he'd opened the lid to invite me, personally, to the world underground. No one else, just me.

Do you really think you can read out my mind? she asks me, face to face. I think so, I say, wishing to convince myself. There has to be a way. It is like looking for lost drops of rain in a river. You're wrong. The mind is not like raindrops. It does not lose itself among other things. If you believe in me at all, than believe this: I promise you I will find it. Everything depends on this. I believe you, she whispers after a moment. Please find my mind.

Closing your eyes isn't going to change anything. Nothing's going to disappear just because you can't see what's going on. In fact, things will even be worse the next time you open your eyes.

And then it struck him what lay buried far down under the earth on which his feet were so firmly planted: the ominous rumbling of the deepest darkness, secret rivers that transported desire, slimy creatures writhing, the lair of earthquakes ready to transform whole cities into mounds of rubble. These, too, were helping to create the rhythm of the earth. He stopped dancing and, catching his breath, stared at the ground beneath his feet as though peering into a bottomless hole.

I don't know how to put it, but I just can't get it through my head that here and now is really here and now. Or that I am really me. It doesn't quite hit home. It's always this way. Only much later on does it ever come together. For the last ten years, it's been like this.

The world is like a great big overcoat, and it needs pockets of various shapes and sizes.

What's really important in life is always the things that are secondary.

En el mundo hay gente educada y gente con tacto. Ambas son buenas cualidades, pero en la mayoría de los cados el tacto supera a la educación

Gradually, I was getting worn down. My sense of direction had evaporated by our fourth day. When south became the opposite of east, I bought a compass, but going around with a compass only made the city seem less and less real. The buildings began to look like backdrops in a photography studio, the people walking in the streets like cardboard cutouts.

In a sense, I'm the one who ruined me: I did it myself.

We all have ordeals we must face," Menshiki said. "It's through them that we find a new direction in our lives. The more grueling the ordeal, the more it can help us down the road.

Exactly. When is comes to anything halfway important, you just don't get it. It's amazing to me that you can put a piece of fiction together' 'Yeah, well, that's a whole different thing.' (from Honey Pie)