Quotes from Haruki Murakami

You can't choose how you're born but you can choose how you die.

This is no honky-tonk parade. 1Q84 is the real world, where a cut draws real blood, where pain is real pain and fear is real fear. The moon in the sky is no paper moon.

He sometimes wondered if she had become involved with him just so that she could cry in someone's arms. Maybe she can't cry alone, and that's why she needs me.

Far away a crow caws. The earth slowly keeps on turning. But beyond any of those details there are dreams. And everyone´s living in them.

En la vida siempre hay cosas demasiado complicadas para explicarlas en cualquier idioma.

Like my hairstyle? she asked. It's great. How great? Great enough to knock down all the trees in all the forests of the world.

To think that each skull once had skin and flesh and was stuffed with gray matter—in varying quantities—teeming with thoughts of food and sex and dominance. All now vanished.

Flaws in oneself open you up to others with flaws.

All imperfections are forced upon the imperfect, so the 'perfect' can live content and oblivious.

I stare at this ceaseless, rushing crowd and imagine a time a hundred years from now. In a hundred years everybody here-me included-will have disappeared from the face of the earth and turned into ashes or dust. A weird thought, but everything in front of me starts to seem unreal, like a gust of wind could blow it all away.

But hell, you've gotta work with what you've got.

what hurt me was actually me, myself. In the midst of that continuing, unsettled silence my feelings, like a heavy pendulum, a razor-sharp blade

Someone once said that nothing costs more and yields less benefit than revenge," Aomame said. "Winston Churchill. As I recall it, though, he was making excuses for the British Empire's budget deficits. It has no moral significance.

I want to write stories that are different from the ones I've written so far, Junpei thought: I want to write about people who dream and wait for the night to end, who long for the light so they can hold the ones they love. But right now I have to stay here and keep watch over this woman and this girl. I will never let anyone-not anyone-try to put them into that crazy box- not even if the sky should fall or the earth crack open with a roar.

Were the stars out when I left the house last evening? All I could remember was the couple in the Skyline listening to Duran Duran. Stars? Who remembers stars? Come to think of it, had I even looked up at the sky recently? Had the stars been wiped out of the sky three months ago, I wouldn't have known.

To deal with something unhealthy, a person needs to be as healthy as possible. That's my motto. In other words, an unhealthy soul requires a healthy body.

The more honest I try to be, the more the right words recede into the distance.

Sometimes you're just the sweetest thing. Like Christmas, summer holidays and a brand-new puppy all rolled into one.

Genius or fool, you don't live in the world alone.

Actually, I'm extremely dissatisfied with being who I am. It's nothing to do with my looks or abilities or status or any of that. It simply has to do with being me. The situation strikes me as grossly unfair.

That's how it is with art. Mere humans who root through their refrigerators at three o'clock in the morning are incapable of such writing.

You are caught between all that was and all that must be. You feel lost. Mark my words: as soon as the bones mend, you will forget about the fracture.

All of us are imperfect human beings living in an imperfect world. We don't live with the mechanical precision of a bank account or by measuring all our lines and angles with rulers and protractors.

Once the ego is born into this world, it has to shoulder morality.