Quotes from Haruki Murakami

I'm always tripped up by the eternal who am I?

Once a guy starts using a wig, he has to keep using one. It's, like, his fate. That's why wig makers make such huge profits. I hate to say it, but they're like drug dealers.

Music has that power to revive memories, sometimes so intensely that they hurt.

That's evolution. Evolution's always hard. Hard and bleak. No such thing as happy evolution

Sometimes when I think of life, I feel like a piece of driftwood washed up on shore.

A story is not something of this world. A real story requires a kind of magical baptism to link the world on this side with the world on the other side.

That was the rule. Break one of my rules once, and I'm bound to break many more.

When I should have felt real pain, I stifled it. I didn't want to take it on, so I avoided facing up to it. Which is why my heart is so empty now.

Nature is actually unnatural

The better you were able to imagine what you wanted to imagine, the farther you could flee from reality.

Some people can work their butts off and never get what they're aiming for while others can get it without any effort at all.

Spending plenty of time on something can be the most sophisticated form of revenge.

That sometimes in life we can't grasp the boundary between reality and unreality. Than boundary always seems to be shifting. As if the border between countries shifts from one day to the next depending on their mood. We need to pay close attention to that movement otherwise we won't know which side we're on.

Like a Chinese box, the world of the novel contained smaller worlds, and inside those were yet smaller worlds. Together, these worlds made up a single universe, and the universe waited there in the book to be discovered by the reader.

You tell me there is no fighting or hatred or desire in the Town. That is a beautiful dream, and I do want your happiness. But the absence of fighting or hatred or desire also means the opposites do not exist either. No joy, no communion, no love. Only where there is disillusionment and depression and sorrow does happiness arise; without despair or loss, there is no hope.

A certain something, he felt, had managed to work its way in through a tiny opening and was trying to fill a blank space inside him. The void was not one that she had made. It had always been there inside him. She had merely managed to shine a special light on it.

Is that what you see in my eyes, that you know nothing about me?" "Nothing is written in your eyes. I replied. It is written in my eyes and i see the reflection in yours

Our worlds are all jumbled together--your world, my world, the sheepman's world. Sometimes they overlap and sometimes they don't.

The heavy smell of flower petals stroked the walls of my lungs.

And when you come back to Japan next summer, let's have that date or whatever you want to call it. We can go to the zoo or the botanical garden or the aquarium, and then we'll have the most politically correct and scrumptious omelets we can find.

Every single day, each time I see her face, see her, it's utterly precious.

Okay, let's put it this way. I would like to sleep with you. But it's alright if I don't sleep with you. What I'm saying is I'd like to be as fair as possible. I don't want to force anything on anybody, any more than I'd want anything forced on me. It's enough that I feel your presence or see your commas swirling around me.

Tobacco's a killer," Kafuku said. "Being alive is a killer, if you think about it," Misaki said.

I couldn't be sure if I had moved forward or fallen behind, or if I was just circling over the same spot.