Quotes from Haruki Murakami

He wore Armani suits and drove a Jaguar, but finally he was just another ant, working and working until he died without meaning. The very fact that he existed in this world would eventually be forgotten. 'Such a shame, he was so young,' people might say. Or they might not.

The only way to understand what's really fair is to take a long-range view of things.

Porque será que estamos condenados a ser assim tão solitários? Qual a razão de tudo isto? Há tanta gente, tanta gente neste mundo, todos à espera de qualquer coisa uns dos outros e, contudo, todos irremediavelmente afastados. Porquê? Continuará a Terra a girar unicamente para alimentar a solidão dos homens?

When asked "Was the model for Midori (a character in Norwegian Wood) modeled after your wife?") I showed your message to my wife. She got mad and yelled: "What would make them think I was the model for Midori?!" She told me to fix the misunderstanding immediately, so that's why I'm writing this reply now. Please stop causing problems in my household. Thank you.

Like a person in a storm desperately grasping at a lamppost, he clung to his daily routine.

Everybody's gotta die sometime. But until then we've still got fifty-some odd years to go, and a lot to think about while we're living those fifty years, and I'll just come right out and say it: that's even more tiring than living five thousand years thinking about nothing. Don't you think?

Opera lovers may be the narrowest people in the world.

I think it's an amazing achievement to find even one specific thing that you're interested in.

Listen to this, Nimit. Follow Coleman Hawkins' improvised lines very carefully. He is using them to tell us something. Pay very close attention. He is telling us the story of the free spirit that is doing everything it can to escape from within him. That same kind of spirit is inside me, inside you. There--you can hear it, I'm sure: the hot breath, the shivering heart. (Thailand)

When the phone rang I was in the kitchen, boiling a potful of spaghetti and whistling along with an FM broadcast of the overture to Rossini's 'The Thieving Magpie,' which has to be the perfect music for cooking pasta.

Ci eravamo incontrati perché doveva succedere, e anche se non fosse stato quel giorno, prima o poi ci saremmo sicuramente incontrati da qualche altra parte.

All these inexplicable events that have occurred in my life so far...it's as though they were all ingeniously programmed from the start of bringing me here.

He must be living a life free of worries. But viewed from his perspective, looking at me from his side of the valley, I might appear to also be living a life of ease and leisure. From a distance, most things look beautiful.

Yet what was time, when you got right down to it? We measured its passage with the hands of a clock for convenience's sake. But was that appropriate? Did time really flow in such a steady and linear way? Couldn't this be a mistaken way of thinking, an error of major proportions?

Kindness was one of the things presently (or permanently) in short supply in the world.

Na minha opinião, a única coisa que podemos fazer pelos mortos é guardá-los na nossa memória.

Phone calls in the dead of the night never brought good news.

He couldn't change my mind about him, though. I went on loving him just the same, and I could never be interested in anyone else.

Some people write string quartets, some grow lettuce and tomatoes. There have to be a few who build railroad stations

Unless you find the fundamental cause and treat that, the same problem will surface later on in a different form.

There's not much you can do about time - it just keeps on passing.

As Pushkin put it: He had no itch to dig for glories deep in the dirt that time has laid.

It's not that I don't believe in contemporary literature, but I don't want to waste valuable time reading any book that has not had the baptism of time. Life is too short. (...) If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking. That's the world of hicks and slobs. Real people would be ashamed of themselves doing that.

The darkness behind my closed eyelids was like the cloud-covered sky, but the gray was somewhat deeper. Every few minutes, someone would come and paint over the gray with a different-textured gray - one with a touch of gold or green or red. I was impressed with the variety of grays that existed. Human beings were so strange. All you had to do was sit still for ten minutes, and you could see this amazing variety of grays.