Quotes from Haruki Murakami

Looking at the ocean makes me miss people, and hanging out with people makes me miss the ocean.

I am here, alone, at the end of the world. I reach out and touch nothing.".

I've been clinging to this world like a discarded shell of an insect stuck to a branch, about to be blown off forever by a gust of wind.

What's most important is what you can't see but can feel in your heart. To be able to grasp something of value, sometimes you have to perform seemingly inefficient acts. But even activities that appear fruitless don't necessarily end up so. That's the feeling I have, as someone who's felt this, who's experienced it.

Time is too conceptual. Not that it stops us from filling it in. So much so, we can't even tell whether our experiences belong to time or to the world of physical things.

I was enveloped in numbness, and absence of feeling so deep the bottom was lost from view.

Then she took my hand and touched it to the wound beside her eye. I caressed the half-inch scar. As I did so, the waves of her consciousness pulsed through my fingertips and into me - a delicate resonance of longing. Probably someone should take this girl in his arms and hold her tight, I thought. Probably someone other than me. Someone qualified to give her something. Goodbye, Mr. Wind-Up Bird. See you again sometime.

You end up exhausted and spent, but later, in retrospect, you realize what it all was for. The parts fall into place, and you can see the whole picture and finally understand the role each individual part plays. The dawn comes, the sky grows light, and the colors and shapes of the roofs of houses, which you could only glimpse vaguely before, come into focus.

And so they parted, she to the east, and he to the west. The test they had agreed upon, however, was utterly unnecessary. They should never have undertaken it, because they really and truly were each other's 100% perfect lovers, and it was a miracle that they had ever met. But it was impossible for them to know this, young as they were. The cold, indifferent waves of fate proceeded to toss them unmercifully.

What we needed were not words and promises but the steady accumulation of small realities.

The world in books seemed so much more alive to me than anything outside. I could see things I'd never seen before. Books and music were my best friends. I had a couple of good friends at school, but never met anyone I could really speak my heart to.

If there's any guy crazy enough to attack me, I'm going to show him the end of the world -- close up. I'm going to let him see the kingdom come with his own eyes. I'm going to send him straight to the southern hemisphere and let the ashes of death rain all over him and the kangaroos and the wallabies.

Listening to the music while stretching her body close to its limit, she was able to attain a mysterious calm. She was simultaneously the torturer and the tortured, the forcer and the forced. This sense of inner-directed self-sufficiency was what she wanted most of all. It gave her deep solace.

Ordinary imperfect people, always choose similarly imperfect people as friends.

Who can really distinguish between the sea and what's reflected in it? Or tell the difference between the falling rain and loneliness?

You know, they've got these chocolate assortments, and you like some but you don't like others? And you eat all the ones you like, and the only ones left are the ones you don't like as much? I always think about that when something painful comes up. Now I just have to polish these off, and everything'll be OK. Life is a box of chocolates. I suppose you could call it a philosophy.

Give yourself five minutes to consider how you can turn a miserable situation to your benefit and that light bulb is going to click on.

You throw a stone into a deep pond. Splash. The sound is big, and it reverberates throughout the surrounding area. What comes out of the pond after that? All we can do is stare at the pond, holding our breath.

People are drawn deeper into tragedy not by their defects but by their virtues.

One impossible day, of an impossible month, of an impossible year.

It's pretty thin, the wall separating healthy confidence and unhealthy Pride.

We fell silent again. The thing we had shared was nothing more than a fragment of time that had died longe ago.Even so, a faint glimmer of that warm memory still claimed a part of my heart. And when death claim me, no doubt I would walk along by that faint light in the brief instant before being flung once again into the abyss of nothingness

You can hide memories, but you can't erase the history that produced them." Sara looked directly into his eyes. "If nothing else, you need to remember that. You can't erase history, or change it. It would be like destroying yourself.

You're optimistic one moment, only to be racked the next by the certainty that it will all fall to pieces. And in the end it does.