Quotes from Haruki Murakami

Convertirse en un hombre sin mujer es muy sencillo: basta con amar locamente a una mujer y que luego ella se marche a alguna parte.

It's hard to stop a war once it starts. Once the sword is drawn, blood's going to be spilled. This doesn't have anything to do with theory or logic, or even my ego. It's just a rule, pure and simple.

In the name of God, they stole her time and her freedom, putting shackles on her heart. They preached about God's kindness, but preached twice as much about his wrath and intolerance.

If you can love someone with your whole heart, even one person, then there's salvation in life.

I'm not cool and collected, and I'm not always doing things at my own pace. It's just a question of balance. I'm just good at habitually shifting the weight I carry around from one side of the fulcrum to the other, distributing it. Maybe this strikes others as cool. But it isn't an easy operation. It takes more time than it seems. And even if I do find the right balance, that doesn't lessen the total weight one bit.

Most of these university types are total phonies. They're scared to death somebody's gonna find they don't know something. They all read the same books and they all throw around the same words, and they get off listening to John Coltrane and seeing Pasolini movies. You call that 'revolution'? That does it for me, then. I'm not going to believe in any damned revolution. Love is all I'm going to believe in.

El destino se lleva siempre su parte y no se retira hasta obtener lo que le corresponde.

Up till a minute ago it felt so real, but now it seems imaginary. Just a few steps is all it takes for everything associated with it to lose all sense of reality. And me--the person who was there until a moment ago--now I seem imaginary too.

Life just isn't fair, is how it used to strike me. Some people can work their butts off and never get what they're aiming for, while others can get it without any effort at all.

Then I got undressed and, crawling under the covers, sat up in bed and sipped my drink. I felt like I was going to fade out any second, but I had to allow myself this luxury. A ritual interlude I like so much between the time I get into bed and the time I fall asleep. Having a drink in bed while listening to music and reading a book. As precious to me as a beautiful sunset or good clean air.

Insane es un problema mental congénito, y se considera conveniente tratarlo con una terapia especializada. En cambio, Lunatic se refiere a una pérdida temporal del juivio debido al efecto de la luna.

I was attracted to her from the first time we talked, and soon there was no turning back. For a long time she was the only thing I could think about. I tried to tell her how I felt, but somehow the feelings and the right words couldn't connect. Maybe it was for the best.

I am me and not me.

When everything's twisted, what's normal ends up looking weird too.

Advertising fillers in the newspaper, philosophy books, dirty pictures in a magazine, a bundle of ten-thousand-yen bills: when you feed 'em to the fire, they're all just paper.

This is pretty obvious, but until things happen, they haven't happened. And often things aren't what they seem.

Beginnings are always like this. One minute everything exists, the next minute everything is lost.

Is this what it means to go back to square one? Most likely. He had nothing left to lose, other than his life.

If you gathered together all the shades of blue in the world and picked the bluest, the epitome of blue, this was the color you would choose.

Whenever she was asked to play something, this piece was the one she most often chose. "Le mal du pays." The groundless sadness called forth in a person's heart by a pastoral landscape. Homesickness. Melancholy. As he lightly shut his eyes and gave himself up to the music, Tsukuru felt his chest tighten with a disconsolate, stifling feeling, as if, before he'd realized it, he'd swallowed a hard lump of cloud.

Here, he said, get yourself some healthy food. You look awful. I said he had done more than enough for me and that I couldn't accept money on top of everything else, but he refused to take it back. It's not money, he said, it's my feelings. Don't think about it too much, just take it. All I could do was thank him and accept the money.

I was thirty-seven then, strapped in my seat as the huge 747 plunged through dense cloud cover on approach to the Hamburg airport.

Kino pulled the covers up, shut his eyes, and covered his ears with his hands. I'm not going to look, not going to listen, he told himself. But he couldn't drown out the sound. Even if he ran to the far corners of the earth and stuffed his ears full of clay, as long as he was still alive those knocks would relentlessly track him down. It wasn't a knocking on a door in a business hotel. It was a knocking on the door to his heart. A person couldn't escape that sound.

So in the end maybe that's the challenge: to look inside your own heart as perceptively and seriously as you can, and to make peace with what you find there. If we hope to truly see another person, we have to start by looking within ourselves.