Quotes from Haruki Murakami

Time flows in strange ways on Sundays, and sights become mysteriously distorted.

The things she most wanted to tell him would lose their meaning the moment she put them into words.

I didn't feel like I was in my own body; my body was just a lonely, temporary container I happened to be borrowing.

Things can be seen better in the darkness, he said, as if he had just seen into her mind. But the longer you spend in the dark, the harder it becomes to return to the world aboveground where the light is

What I think is this: You should give up looking for lost cats and start searching for the other half of your shadow.

Every once in a while she'll get worked up and cry like that. But that's ok. She's letting her feelings out. The scary thing is not being able to do that. Then your feelings build up and harden and die inside. That's when you're in big trouble.

Genius or fool, you don't live in the world alone. You can hide underground or you can build a wall around yourself, but somebody's going to come along and screw up the works.

I closed my eyes and listened carefully for the descendants of Sputnik, even now circling the earth, gravity their only tie to the planet. Lonely metal souls in the unimpeded darkness of space, they meet, pass each other, and part, never to meet again. No words passing between them. No promises to keep.

Aren't you afraid of dying? Not really. I've watched lots of good-for-nothing, worthless people die, and if people like that can do it, then I should be able to handle it.

You know what I'd really like to do the most right now? Climb up to the top of some high place like the pyramids. The highest place I can find. Where you can see forever. Stand on the very top, look all around the world, see all the scenery, and see with my own eyes what's been lost from the world.

Quizás aun no te comprenda. Pero, con un poco de tiempo, llegaré a entenderte. Y no habrá nadie en el mundo que te comprenda mejor que yo.

It doesn't matter how old I get, but as long as I continue to live I'll always discover something new about myself.

According to Chekhov, Tamaru said, rising from his chair, once a gun appears in a story, it has to be fired. Meaning what? Meaning, don't bring unnecessary props into a story. If a pistol appears, it has to be fired at some point. Chekhov liked to write stories that did away with all useless ornamentation.

Fairness is a concept that holds only in limited situations. Yet we want the concept to extend to everything, in and out of phase. From snails to hardware stores to married life. Maybe no one finds it, or even misses it, but fairness is like love. What is given has nothing to do with what we seek.

The thoughts that occur to me while I'm running are like clouds in the sky. Clouds of all different sizes. They come and they go, while the sky remains the same sky always. The clouds are mere guests in the sky that pass away and vanish, leaving behind the sky.

Whenever I look at the ocean, I always want to talk to people, but when I'm talking to people, I always want to look at the ocean.

My peak? Would I even have one? I hardly had had anything you could call a life. A few ripples. some rises and falls. But that's it. Almost nothing. Nothing born of nothing. I'd loved and been loved, but I had nothing to show. It was a singularly plain, featureless landscape. I felt like I was in a video game. A surrogate Pacman, crunching blindly through a labyrinth of dotted lines. The only certainty was my death.

most people in the world don't really use their brains to think. And people who don't think are the ones who don't listen to others.

Nothing so consumes a person as meaningless exertion

Our memory is made up of our individual memories and our collective memories. The two are intimately linked. And history is our collective memory. If our collective memory is taken from us - is rewritten - we lose the ability to sustain our true selves.

This person, this self, this me, finally, was made somewhere else. Everything had come from somewhere else, and it would all go somewhere else. I was nothing but a pathway for the person known as me.

Everything, everything seemed once-upon-a-time.

The right words always seemed to come too late.

But metaphors help eliminate what separates you and me.