Quotes from Haruki Murakami

Everyone may be ordinary, but they're not normal.

There's no such thing as perfect writing, just like there's no such thing as perfect despair.

So I made up my mind I was going to find someone who would love me unconditionally three hundred and sixty-five days a year. Watanabe: Wow, and did your search pay off? M: That's the hard part. I guess I've been waiting so long I'm looking for perfection. That makes it tough.

Whiskey, like a beautiful woman, demands appreciation. You gaze first, then it's time to drink.

As we go through life we gradually discover who we are, but the more we discover, the more we lose ourselves.

I am nothing. I'm like someone who's been thrown into the ocean at night, floating all alone. I reach out, but no one is there. I call out, but no one answers. I have no connection to anything.

For both of us, it had simply been too enormous an experience. We shared it by not talking about it . Does this make any sense?

Dreams come from the past, not from the future. Dreams shouldn't control you--you should control them.

But what seems like a reasonable distance to one person might feel too far to somebody else.

No matter where i go, i still end up me. What's missing never changes. The scenery may change, but i'm still the same incomplete person. The same missing elements torture me with a hunger that i can never satisfy. I think that lack itself is as close as i'll come to defining myself.

That's how stories happen — with a turning point, an unexpected twist. There's only one kind of happiness, but misfortune comes in all shapes and sizes. It's like Tolstoy said. Happiness is an allegory, unhappiness a story.

Don't pointless things have a place, too, in this far-from-perfect world?

Loneliness becomes an acid that eats away at you.

I've always done whatever I felt like doing in life. People may try to stop me, and convince me I'm wrong, but I won't change.

There are ways of dying that don't end in funerals. Types of death you can't smell.

Beyond the edge of the world there's a space where emptiness and substance neatly overlap, where past and future form a continuous, endless loop. And, hovering about, there are signs no one has ever read, chords no one has ever heard.

Some things in life are too complicated to explain in any language.

This is one more piece of advice I have for you: don't get impatient. Even if things are so tangled up you can't do anything, don't get desperate or blow a fuse and start yanking on one particular thread before it's ready to come undone. You have to realize it's going to be a long process and that you'll work on things slowly, one at a time.

Which is why I am writing this book. To think. To understand. It just happens to be the way I'm made. I have to write things down to feel I fully comprehend them.

As I see it, you are living with something that you keep hidden deep inside. Something heavy. I felt it from the first time I met you. You have a strong gaze, as if you have made up your mind about something. To tell you the truth, I myself carry such things around inside. Heavy things. That is how I can see it in you.

If they invent a car that runs on stupid jokes, you could go far.

We knew exactly what we wanted in each other. And even so, it ended. One day it stopped, as if the film simply slipped off the reel.

Things like that happen all the time in this great big world of ours. It's like taking a boat out on a beautiful lake on a beautiful day and thinking both the sky and the lake are beautiful. So stop eating yourself up alive. Things will go where they're supposed to go if you just let them take their natural course.

The light of morning decomposes everything.