Quotes from Haruki Murakami

Never really loved by anyone, never seeming really to love anyone either

The things we try our hardest not to lose, we really just put deep abysses in the spaces between them.

Something in her small eyes caught the sunlight and glistened, like a glacier on the faraway face of a mountain.

You have to experience it to understand. One thing I can say, though, is that once you see that true sight with your own eyes, the world you've lived in up till now will look flat and insipid. There's no logic or illogic in that scene. No good or evil. Everything is merged into one. And you are part of that merging. You leave the boundary of your physical body behind to become a metaphysical being. You become intuition.

It is a lonely life sometimes, like throwing a stone into the deep darkness. It might hit something, but you can't see it. The only thing you can do is to guess, and to believe.

But there are times in this world when it's not enough just not to do the wrong thing

I, too, remember that feeling. You are caught between all that was and all that must be. You feel lost.

Whatever it is you're seeking won't come in the form you're expecting

To be able to grasp something of value, sometimes you have to perform seemingly inefficient acts.

Your problem is that your shadow is a bit - how should I put it? Faint. I thought this the first time I laid eyes on you, that the shadow you cast on the ground is only half as dark as that of ordinary people… What I think is this: You should give up looking for lost cats and start searching for the other half of your shadow

Ella ya sólo existe en mis recuerdos. Se ha ido de mi lado. Estaba aquí, pero ha desaparecido. Y allí no hay término medio. Donde no hay lugar para el compromiso no puede haber un término medio. Los quizá tal vez existan al sur de la frontera. No al oeste del sol.

Si no quieres acabar en un manicomio, abre tu corazon y abandonate al curso natural de la vida

I'm not very good at putting my feelings into words. That's why people misunderstand me.

Once you're lost, you panic. You're in total despair, not knowing what to do. I hate it when that happens. Sex can be a real pain that way, 'cause when you get in the mood all you can think about is what's right under your nose - that's sex, all right.

But finally, Mr. Wind-Up Bird, isn't that just what life is? Aren't we all trapped in the dark somewhere, and they've taken away our food and water, and we're slowly dying, little by little...?

Beethoven, he learned, was a proud man who believed absolutely in his own abilities and never bothered to flatter the nobility. Believing that art itself, and the proper expression of emotions, was the most SUBLIME thing in the world, he thought political power and wealth only served one purpose: to make art possible.

I was alive in the past, and I'm alive now, sitting here talking to you. But what you see here isn't really me. This is just a shadow of who I was. You are really living. But I'm not. Even these words I'm saying right now sound empty, like an echo.

Spend your money on the things money can buy. Spend your time on the things money can't buy

From the photo albums, every single print of her had been peeled away. Shots of the both of us together had been cut, the parts with her neatly trimmed away, leaving my image behind. Photos of me alone or of mountains and rivers and deer and cats were left intact. Three albums rendered into a revised past. It was as if I'd been alone at birth, alone all my days, and would continue alone.

If I'm going to merely ramble, maybe I should just snuggle under the warm covers, think of Miu, and play with myself.

People are by and large a product of where they were born and raised. How you think and feel's always linked to the lie of the land, the temperature. The prevailing winds, even.

The world of the grotesque is the darkness within us.

She gave me this look – she might have been watching from a lifeboat as the ship went down. Or maybe it was the other way around.

All of a sudden out of nowhere I can bring back things I haven't thought about for years. It's pretty interesting. Memory is so crazy! It's like we've got these drawers crammed with tons of useless stuff. Meanwhile, all the really important things we just keep forgetting, one after the other.