Quotes from Haruki Murakami

Thinking about spaghetti that boils eternally but is never done is a sad, sad thing.

Writing from memory like this, I often feel a pang of dread. What if I've forgotten the most important thing? What if somewhere inside me there is a dark limbo where all the the truly important memories are heaped and slowly turning into mud?

You're you , you see, and nobody else. You are you, right?

And everywhere, infinite options, infinite possibilities. An infinity, and at the same time, zero. We try to scoop it all up in our hands, and what we get is a handful of zero. That's the city

Constipation was one of the things she hated most in the world, on par with despicable men who commit domestic violence and narrow-minded religious fundamentalists.

She knew that my memories of her would fade. Which is precisely why she begged me never to forget her, to remember that she had existed. The thought fills me with an almost unbearable sorrow. Because Naoko never loved me.

Now for a good twelve-hour sleep, I told myself. Twelve solid hours. Let birds sing, let people go to work. Somewhere out there, a volcano might blow, Israeli commandos might decimate a Palestinian village. I couldn't stop it. I was going to sleep.

You have to look! Johnnie Walker commanded. That's another one of our rules. Closing your eyes isn't going to change anything. Nothing's going to disappear just because you can't see what going on. In fact, things will be even worse the next time you open your eyes. That's the kind of world we live in, Mr. Nakata. Keep your eyes wide open. Only a coward closes his eyes. Closing your eyes and plugging up your ears won't make time stand still.

Death leaves cans of shaving cream half-used.

But falling in love is always a pretty crazy thing. It might appear out of the blue and just grab you. Who knows—maybe even tomorrow.

I was confident that I was a special person. But time slowly chips away at life. People don't just die when their time comes. They gradually die away, from the inside. And finally the day comes when you have to settle accounts. Nobody can escape it. People have to pay the price for what they've received. I have only just learned that truth.

She curled up and pressed her cheek against his chest. Her ear was right above his heart. She was listening to his thoughts. I need to know this, Aomame said. That we're in the same world, seeing the same things.

No matter how far they go, people can never be anything but themselves.

It's the real world, full of gaps and inconsistencies and anticlimaxes.

Learning another language is like becoming another person.

My very existence, my life in the world, seemed like a hallucination. A strong wind would make me think my body was about to be blown to the end of the earth, to some land I had never seen or heard of, where my mind and body would separate forever. "Hold tight," I would tell myself, but there was nothing for me to hold on to.

Overhead, the two moons worked together to bathe the world in a strange light.

Start making excuses and there's no end to it. I can't live that kind of life.

I closed my eyes and tried to sleep. But it was not until much later that I was able to get any real sleep. In a place far away from anyone or anywhere, I drifted off for a moment.

I have only a few reasons to keep on running, and a truckload of them to quit. All I can do is keep those few reasons nicely polished.

If writers only wrote about things everybody knew, what the hell would be the point of writing?

People soon get tired of things that aren't boring, but not of what is boring. Go figure. For me, I might have the leisure to be bored, but not to grow tired of something. Most people can't distinguish between the two.

Violence does not always take visible form, and not all wounds gush blood

I never could stand being forced to do something I didn't want to do at a time I didn't want to do it. Whenever I was able to do something I liked to do, though, when I wanted to do it, and the way I wanted to do it, I'd give it everything I had.