Quotes from Haruki Murakami

Nights without work I spent with whisky and books.

Nature grants its beauty to us all, drawing no line between rich and poor.

And worse, I was in love. Love with complications.

If you don't believe in the world, and if there is no love in it, then everything is phony. No matter which world we are talking about, no matter what kind of world we are talking about, the line separating fact from hypothesis is practically invisible to the eye. It can only be seen with the inner eye, the eye of the mind.

It was a stillness so profound one had to adjust one's hearing to it. .... The silence seemed to be trying to tell him something about itself.

When you introduce things that most readers have never seen before into a piece of fiction, you have to describe them with as much precision and in as much detail as possible. What you can eliminate from fiction is the description of things that most readers have seen.

Enough of your prattle, the old man said. I cannot abide people who conjure up a raft of excuses, disparaging the efforts of those who have gone out of their way to help them. Such people are common trash.

Some people are polite, and some are quick. Each one's a good quality to have, but most of the time quickness trumps politeness.

The world was big and full of weird things and strange people.

What most moved me in his letter was the sense of frustration that permeated the lieutenent's words: the frustration of never quite being able to depict or explain anything to his full satisfaction.

Probably is a world you my find south of the border. But never, ever west of the sun.

The real world—where I probably could never be happy, and never get anywhere.

No matter what you tell me, no matter how legitimate your reasons, I can never just forget about you, I can never push the years we spent together out of my mind. I can't do it because they really happened, they are part of my life, and there is no way I can just erase them. That would be the same as erasing my own self. I have to know what legitimate reason there could be for doing such a thing.

The most frightening thing in the world is our own self.

It's important in life to get used to losing.

There can be no meaning in what will someday be lost. Passing glory is not true glory at all.

She'd become so beautiful, it defied understanding. Never had I feasted my eyes on such beauty. Beauty of a variety I'd never imagined existed. As expansive as the entire universe, yet as dense as a glacier. Unabashedly excessive, yet at the same time pared down to an essence. It transcended all concepts within the boundaries of my awareness. She was at one with her ears, gliding down the oblique face of time like a protean beam of light.

I'm still not sure I made the right choice when I told my wife about the bakery attack.But then,it might not have been a question of right or wrong. Which is to say that wrong choices can produce right results, and vice versa. I myself have adopted the position that,in fact, we never choose anything at all. Things happen. Or not.

You are a major dimwit. Is your brain made out of jello, you spineless twit? A leaf? What do you think I am, one of those magical raccoons? I'm a concept, get it? Con-cept! Concepts and raccoons aren't exactly the same, now are they? What a dumb thing to say...

Well, finally, once you become an orphan, you're an orphan till the day you die. I keep having the same dream. I'm seven years old and an orphan again. All alone, with no adults around to take care of me. It's evening, and the light is fading, and night is pressing in. It's always the same. In the dream I always go back to being seven years old. Software like that you can't exchange once it's contaminated.

If I can draw you the right way, maybe you'll be able to see yourself through my eyes, I said, If all goes well, of course. That's why we needs pictures. You're right--that's why we need pictures. Or literature, or music, or anything of that sort.

The new day is almost here, but the old one is still dragging its heavy skirts. Just as ocean water and river water struggle against each other at a river mouth, the old time and the new time clash and blend.

Sometimes fate is like a small sandstorm that keeps changing directions. You change direction but the sandstorm chases you. You turn again, but the storm adjusts. Over and over you play this out, like some ominous dance with death just before dawn. Why? Because this storm isn't some­ thing that blew in from far away, something that has nothing to do with you. This storm is you. Something inside of you.

From his shoulder on down, the Rat felt the supple weight of her body. An odd sensation, that weight. This being that could love a man, bear children, grow old, and die; to think one whole existence was in this weight.