Quotes from Haruki Murakami

It's true that life brings us far more defeats than victories. And real-life wisdom arises not so much from knowing how we might beat someone as from learning how to accept defeat with grace.

In order to pin down reality as realilty, we need another reality to relativize the first. Yet that other reality requires a third reality to serve as its grounding. An endless chain is created within our consciousness, and it is the maintenance of this chain which produces the sensation that we are actually here, that we ourselves exist.

Tolstoy's famous line, all happiness is alike, but each pain is painful in its own way.

Aomame raised her glass to the moon and asked, "Have you gone to bed with someone in your arms lately?" The moon did not answer. "Do you have any friends?" she asked. The moon did not answer. "Don't you get tired of always playing it cool?" The moon did not answer.

If this was a dream, then the world I'm living in itself must all be a dream.

Good question, but no answer. Good questions never have answers.

Hatsumi had a pretty good idea that Nagasawa was sleeping around, but she never complained to him. She was seriously in love with him, but she never made demands. 'I don't deserve a girl like Hatsumi,' Nagasawa once said to me. I had to agree with him.

I don't know, it's stupid being 20, she said. I'm just not ready. It feels weird. Like somebody's pushing me from behind.

As with marathon runs and lengths of toilet paper, there had to be standards to measure up to.

The morning air of the pasture turned steadily cooler. Day by day, the bright golden leaves of the birches turned more spotted as the first winds of winter slipped between the withered branches and across the highlands toward the southeast. Stopping in the center of the pasture, I could hear the winds clearly. No turning back, they pronounced. The brief autumn was gone.

I know I'm a little different from everyone else, but I'm still human being. That's what I'd like you to realize. I'm just a regular person, not some monster. I feel the same things everyone else does, act the same way. Sometimes, though, that small difference feels like an abyss. But I guess there's not much I can do about it.

Just speak your mind honestly. That's the best thing. It may hurt a little sometimes, and someone may get upset, but in the long run, it's for the best.

No two human beings are alike; it's a question of identity. And what is identity? The cognitive system arisin' from the aggregate memories of that individual's past experiences. The layman's word for this is the mind. Not two human beings have the same mind. At the same time, human beings have almost no grasp of their own cognitive systems. I don't, you don't, nobody does. All we know—or think we know—is but a fraction of the whole cake. A mere tip of the icing.

Whatever can't be expressed might as well not exist.

There are all kinds of things we have to deal with in life," Eri finally said. "And one thing always seems to connect with another. You try to solve one problem, only to find that another one you hadn't anticipated arises instead. It's not that easy to get free of them.

Well, finally, the events I've been through have been tremendously complicated. All kinds of characters have come on the scene, and strange things have happened one after another, to the point where, if I try to think about them in order, I lose track.

You said that the mind is like the wind but perhaps it is we who are like the wind Knowing nothing, simply blowing through. Never aging, never dying.

We can, if we so choose, wander aimlessly over the continent of the arbitrary. Rootless as some winged seed blown about on a serendipitous spring breeze. Nonetheless, we can in the same breath deny that there is any such thing as coincidence. What's done is done, what's yet to be is clearly yet to be. In other words, sandwiched as we are between the everything that is behind us and the zero beyond us, ours is an ephemeral existence in which there is neither coincidence nor possibility.

No matter how mundane some action might appear, keep at it long enough and it becomes a contemplative, even meditative act.

I can't afford to take responsibilities for others' lives. It's all I can do to bear the weight of my own life and my own loneliness.

Gays, lesbians, straights, feminists, fascist pigs, communists, Hare Krishnas - none of them bother me. I don't care what banner they raise. But what I can't stand are hollow people. When I'm with them I just can't bare it, and wind up saying things I shouldn't.

I'm not very good at giving people orderly explanations of things.

People lose fifty million skin cells every day. The cells get scraped off and turn into invisible dust, and disappear into the air. Maybe we are nothing but skin cells as far as the world is concerned.

No, I don't think I've been defiled. But I haven't been saved, either. There's nobody who can save me right now, Mr. Wind-Up Bird. The world looks totally empty to me. Everything I see around me looks fake. The only thing thay isn't fake is that gooshy thing inside me.