Quotes from Haruki Murakami

Sometimes I feel as if I'm racing with my own shadow, Korogi says. But that's one thing I'll never be able to outrun. Nobody can shake off their own shadow.

Oshima's silent for a time as he gazes at the forest, eyes narrowed. Birds are flitting from one branch to the next. His hands are clasped behind his head. I know how you feel, he finally says. But this is something you have to work out on your own. Nobody can help you. That's what love's all about, Kafka. You're the one having those wonderful feelings, but you have to go it alone as you wander through the dark. Your mind and body have to bear it all. All by yourself.

In most cases learning something essential in life requires physical pain.

Don't let appearances fool you. There's always only one reality!

People with dark souls have nothing but dark dreams. People with really dark souls do nothing but dream.

Everybody feels safe belonging not to the excluded minority but to the excluding majority. You think, Oh, I'm glad that's not me. It's basically the same in all periods in all societies. If you belong to the majority, you can avoid thinking about lots of troubling things.

You can see a person's whole life in the cancer they get.

Artists are those who can evade the verbose.

Her cry was the saddest sound of orgasm that I had ever heard.

A friend to kill time is a friend sublime.

It's like the Tibetan Wheel of the Passions. As the wheel turns, the values and feelings on the outer rim rise and fall, shining or sinking into darkness. But true love stays fastened to the axle and doesn't move.

We live in a pretty apathetic age, yet we're surrounded by an enormous amount of information about other people. If you feel like it, you can easily gather that information about them. Having said that, we still hardly know anything about people.

Huge organizations and me don't get along. They're too inflexible, waste too much time, and have too many stupid people.

What was lost was lost. There was no retrieving it, however you schemed, no returning to how things were, no going back.

You're afraid of imagination and even more afraid of dreams. Afraid of the resposibility that begins in dreams. But you have to sleep and dreams are a part of sleep. When you're awake you can suppress imagination but you can't supress dreams.

Between the time the last train leaves and the first train arrives, the place changes: it's not the same as in daytime.

You've already decided what you're going to do, and all that's left is to set the wheels in motion. I mean, it's your life. Basically, you gotta go with what you think is right.

I'm not a fast reader. I like to linger over each sentence, enjoying the style. If I don't enjoy the writing, I stop.

A person's destiny is something you look back at afterwards, not something to be known in advance.

Instead of a stable truth, I choose unstable possibilities.

Memory is like fiction; or else it's fiction that's like memory.

Now all you can do is wait. It must be hard for you, but there is a right time for everything. Like the ebb and flow of tides. No one can do anything to change them. When it is time to wait, you must wait.

No one could say how long that life would last. Whatever has form can disappear in an instant.

Wherever there's hope there's a trial.