Quotes from Haruki Murakami

Why does loving somebody mean you have to hurt them just as much? I mean if that's the way it goes, what's the point of loving someone? Why the hell does it have to be like that?

But thing in the past are like plate that's shattered to pieces. You can never put it back together like it was, right?

By then running had entered the realm of the metaphysical. First there came the action of running, and accompanying it there was this entity known as me. I run; therefore I am.

Loving someone is like having a mental illness that's not covered by health insurance.

What's nurtured slowly grows well.

Suicides? Heart attacks? The papers didn't seem interested. The world was full of ways to die, too many to cover. Newsworthy deaths had to be exceptional. Most people go unobserved.

I'd made it back to the land of the living. No matter how boring or mediocre a world it might be, this was it.

Any explanation or logic that explains everything so easily has a hidden trap in it. I'm speaking from experience. Somebody once said if it's something a single book can explain, it's not worth having explained. What I mean is don't leap to any conclusions.

Ever since that happened to me, I haven't been able to give myself to anyone in this world.

People are born in order to live, right? But the longer I've lived, the more I've lost what's inside me - and ended up empty. And I bet the longer I live, the emptier, the more worthless, I'll become. Something's wrong with this picture. Life isn't supposed to turn out like this! Isn't it possible to shift direction, to change where I'm headed?

There are no truly strong people. Only people who pretend to be strong.

You can have all the desire and ache inside you want, but what you really need is a concrete starting point.

I was dying. Like all the other people who live in this world.

Nah, I shook my head, things that come out of nowhere go back to nowhere, that's all. We fell silent again. The thing we had shared was nothing more than a fragment of time that had died long ago. Even so, a faint glimmer of that warm memory still claimed a part of my heart. And when death claimed 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.

Do you know what 'Sputnik' means in Russian? 'Travelling companion'. I looked it up in a dictionary not long ago. Kind of a strange coincidence if you think about it. I wonder why the Russians gave their satellite that strange name. It's just a poor little lump of metal, spinning around the Earth.

It's strange, isn't it?' the woman said in a pensive voice. 'Everything is blowing up around us, but there are still those who care about a broken lock, and others who are dutiful enough to try to fix it... But maybe that's the way it should be. Maybe working on the little things as dutifully and honestly as we can is how we stay sane when the world is falling apart.

Exerting yourself to the fullest within your individual limits: that's the essence of running, and a metaphor for life—-and for me, for writing as well.

From my own experience, when someone is trying very hard to get something, they don't. And when they're running away from something as hard as they can, it usually catches up with them. I'm generalizing, of course.

Listen, every object's in flux. The Earth, time, concepts, love, life, faith, justice, evil--they're all fluid and in transition. They don't stay in one form or in one place forever. The whole universe is like some big FedEx box.

Painful is the stress when one cannot reproduce or convey vividly to others, however hard he tries, what he's experienced so intensely.

Shimamoto had her own little world within her. A world that was for her alone, one I could not enter.

I just want to think deeply about things. Contemplate ideas in a pure, free sort of way. That's all. If you think about it, that's kind of like constructing a vacuum.

This is the extent of his knowledge of the sea: it was very big, it was salty, and fish lived there.

If you can love someone with your whole heart, even one person, then there's salvation in life. Even if you can't get together with that person.