Quotes from Haruki Murakami

In the instant Miu touched her hair, Sumire fell in love, like she was crossing a field and bang! a bolt of lightning zapped her right in the head. Something akin to an artistic revelation.

Somerset Maugham once wrote that in each shave lies a philosophy. I couldn't agree more. No matter how mundane some action might appear, keep at it long enough and it becomes contemplative, even meditative act.

As I run I tell myself to think of a river. And clouds. But essentially I'm thinking of not a thing. All I do is keep on running in my own cozy, homemade void, my own nostalgic silence. And this is a pretty wonderful thing. No matter what anybody else says.

I believe that it's not necessary to believe in the soul's existence. But turn that around and you come to the belief that there's no need to not believe in its existence.

Turning all this over in my mind, I started to imagine another me somewhere, sitting in a bar, nursing a whiskey, without a care in the world. The more I thought about it, the more that other me became the real me, making this me here not real at all.

Between a high, solid wall and an egg that breaks against it, I will always stand on the side of the egg.

Dawn in Mongolia was an amazing thing. In one instant, the horizon became a faint line suspended in the darkness, and then the line was drawn upward, higher and higher. It was as if a giant hand had stretched down from the sky and slowly lifted the curtain of night from the face of the earth. It was a magnificent sight, far greater in scale...than anything that I, with my limited human faculties, could fully comprehend.

Para las personas, los recuerdos son el combustible que les permite continuar viviendo. Y para el mantenimiento de la vida, no importa que esos recuerdos valgan o no la pena. Son simple combustible.

The facts and techniques or whatever they teach you in class isn't going to be very useful in the real world, that's for sure.

to me my face in the mirror looked like a virtual fragment of my self that had been split in two. The self there was the one I hadn't chosen. It wasn't even a physical reflection.

Death exists--in a paperweight, in four red and white balls on a billiard table--and we go on living and breathing it into our lungs like fine dust.

Then back to the stage, and the acting. The bright lights, the rehearsed lines. The applause, the falling curtain. Leaving who one was for a brief time, then returning. But the self that one returned to was never exactly the same as the self that one had left behind.

Halfway through April Naoko turned twenty. She was seven months older than I was, my own birthday being in November. There was something strange about Naoko's becoming twenty. I felt as if the only thing that made sense, whether for Naoko or for me, was to keep going back and forth between eighteen and nineteen. After eighteen would come nineteen, and after nineteen, eighteen. Of course. But she turned twenty. And in the fall, I would do the same. Only the dead stay seventeen forever.

That's what we all do: endlessly take the long way around.

If you think about it, an unfair society is a society that makes it possible for you to exploit your abilities to the limit.

Reality's just the accumulation of ominous prophecies come to life. All you have to do is open a newspaper on any given day to weigh the good news versus the bad news, and you'll see what I mean.

Si leyera lo mismo que los demás, acabaría pensando como ellos.

Without a true self, a person can not go on living. It is like the ground we stand on. Without the ground, we can build nothing.

It's a terrible thing when a person dies, whatever the circumstances. A hole opens up in the world, and we need to pay the proper respects. If we don't, the hole will never be filled in again.

The ones who did it can always rationalize their actions and even forget what they did. They can turn away from things they don't want to see. But the surviving victims can never forget. They can't turn away. Their memories are passed on from parent to child. That's what the world is, after all: an endless battle of contrasting memories.

Originality is nothing but judicious imitation. So said Voltaire, the realist." "You agree with that?" "Everything has boundaries. The same holds true with thought. You shouldn't fear boundaries, but you also should not be afraid of destroying them. That's what is most important if you want to be free: respect for and exasperation with boundaries.

The library was like a second home. Or maybe more like a real home, more than the place I lived in. By going every day I got to know all the lady librarians who worked there. They knew my name and always said hi. I was painfully shy, though, and could barely reply.

Better to be a first-class matchbox than a second-class match.

And, well, mine are kind of on the heavy side anyway. The first day or two, I don't want to do ANYTHING. Make sure you keep away from me then.' I'd like to, but how can I tell?' I asked. O.K., I'll wear a hat for a couple of days after my period starts. A red one. That should work,' she said with a laugh. 'If you see me on the street and I'm wearing a red hat, don't talk to me, just run away.