Quotes from Haruki Murakami

I miss you something awful sometimes, but in general I go on living with all the energy I can muster.

Don't let appearances fool you. There's always only one reality.

Date etiquette lesson number two: Don't die. Go on living.

Every story has a time to be told, I convinced her. Otherwise you'll be forever a prisoner to the secret inside you.

My arm was not the one she needed, but the arm of someone else. My warmth was not what she needed, but the warmth of someone else. I felt almost guilty being me.

I'd like to have a good long talk with you once you've calmed down. Please call me soon. Happy Birthday.

I got to know her well, and we talked about all sorts of things. We understood each other. You could even say I loved her.

Like a button on a shirt buttoned wrong, every attempt to correct things led to yet another fine --not to say elegant-- mess.

So this was how secrets got started, I thought to myself. People constructed them little by little. I had not intended to keep May Kasahara a secret from Kumiko. My relationship with her was not that big a deal, finally: whether I mentioned it or not was of no consequence. Once it had flown down a certain delicate channel, however, it had become cloaked in the opacity of secretiveness, whatever my original intention had have been.

Like a blind dolphin, the night of the new moon silently drew near.

I don't know what I want. And, if that's the case, as my ex-wife said, I'd only hurt people.

not everything was lost in the flow of time [.....]we truly believed in something back then, and we knew we were the kind of people capable of believing in something - with all our hearts. And that kind of hope will never simply vanish.

I'm safe inside this container called me.

That's what love's all about, Kafka. You're the one having those wonderful feelings, but you have to go it alone as you wander through the dark. Your mind and body have to bear it all. All by yourself.

Noboru Wataya is a person who belongs to a world that is the exact opposite of yours... In a world where you are losing everything, Mr.Okada, Noboru Wataya is gaining everything. In a world where you are rejected, he is accepted. And the opposite is just as true. Which is why he hates you so intensely.

It is as evil as we are positive...the more desperately we try to be good and wonderful and perfect, the more the Shadow develops a definite will to be black and evil and destructive... The fact is that if one tries beyond one's capacity to be perfect, the Shadow descends to hell and becomes the devil.

And most likely, that was the future in a nutshell, Sumire growing ever more distant. It made me sad. I felt like I was a meaningless bug clinging for no special reason to a high stone wall on a windy night, with no plans, no beliefs. Sumire said she missed me. But she had Miu beside her. I had no one. all I had was-me. Same as always.

Never trust a man who carries a handkerchief, I always say. One of many prejudicial rules of thumb.

The death of a dream can be, in a way, sadder than that of a living being. Sometimes it all seems so unfair.

finally he was just another ant, working and working until he died without meaning.

I'm not trying to imply I can keep up this silent, isolated facade all the time. Sometimes the wall I've erected around me comes crumbling down. It doesn't happen very often, but sometimes, before I even realize what's going on, there I am--naked and defenseless and totally confused. At times like that I always feel an omen calling out to me, like a dark, omnipresent pool of water. ~page 10

Even so, everything was ever so slightly off, as if little by little the tracing paper had slipped irretrievably from the lines of summers past.

If you have to choose between something that has form and something that doesn't, go for the one without form. That's my rule.

I could go on like this forever, but would I ever find a place that was meant for me? Like, for example, where? After lengthy considerations, the only place I could think of was the cockpit of a two-seater Kamikaze torpedo-plane. Of all the dumb ideas. In the first place, all the torpedo-planes were scrapped thirty years ago