Quotes from Haruki Murakami

What has gone forward can't go back to where it came from.

The kind of helpless feeling when everything you're used to has been ripped away. Like there's no more gravity, and I'm left to drift in outer space with no idea where I'm going.

Nobody is easier to fool than the person who is convinced that he is right

And she leaves. She opens the door and, without a backward glance, goes out and shuts the door. I stand at the window and watch her go. She vanishes in the shadow of a building. Hands resting on the sill, I gaze for the longest time at where she disappeared. Maybe she forgot something she wanted to say and will come back. But she never does. All that's left is an absence that's like a hollow space.

For a while is a phrase whose length can't be measured. At least by the person who's waiting. And probably is a word whose weight is incalculable.

It's like doughnut holes. Whether you take a doughnut hole as a blank space or as an entity unto itself is a purely metaphysical question and does not affect the taste of the doughnut one bit.

I don't mind ironing at all. There's a special satisfaction in making wrinkled things smooth.

We habitually cut out pieces of time to fit us, so we tend to fool ourselves into thinking that time is our size, but it really goes on and on.

As if a great creature had grown old without being able to express its feelings. Not that it didn't know how to express them, but rather it didn't know what to express.

Não é fácil fazer generalizações sobre a dor. Cada dor tem as suas características próprias. Reformulando a famosa frase de Tolstói: Todas as felicidades se parecem umas com as outras; cada dor dói à sua maneira.

no matter how advanced the system, no matter how precise, unless we have the will to communicate, there's no connection. And even supposing the will is there, there are times like now when we don't know the other party's number. Or even if we know the number, we misdial.

The past and the present, might we say, go like this . The future is a maybe . Yet we look back on the darkness that obscures the path that brought us fair, we only come up with another indefinite maybe . The only thing we perceive with any clarity is the present moment, and even that just passes by.

I don't think it's a question of liking or disliking it, Tengo said...It was the one thing he was best at. Hmm. I see, Kumi said. She pondered this. But that might very well be the best way to live your life.

You don't get it, do you? Person A understands Person B because the time is right for that to happen, not because Person B wants to be understood by Person A. (...) it's not a mistake, most people would call that love, if you think you want to understand me.

I never had what it takes to make a first-rate anything.' 'That's wrong,' she declared. 'Everyone must have one thing that they can excel at. It's just a matter of drawing it out, isn't it?' But school doesn't know how to draw it out. It crushes the gift. It's no wonder most people never get to be what they want to be. They just get ground down.

fairness is like love. What is given has nothing to do with what we seek

It must be a wonderful thing to be so sure that you love somebody.

What we shared was no more than a fragment of a time long dead. Yet memories remained, warm memories that remained with me like lights from the past. And I would carry those lights in the brief interval before death grabbed me and tossed me back into the crucible of nothingness.

Then, all but instinctively, I took her in my arms. Pressed against me, her whole body trembling, she continued to cry without a sound.

The sad truth is that what I could recall in five seconds all too soon needed ten, then thirty, thena full minute...

And it came to me then. That we were wonderful travelling companions, but in the end no more than lonely lumps of metal on their own separate orbits. From far off they look like beautiful shooting stars, but in reality they're nothing more than prisons, where each of us is locked up alone, going nowhere

Some things can't be solved just by going wild every now and then.

It must be hard to pass your twentieth birthday alone.

It was a day like a slow-motion video of twilight. Uneventful, to put it mildly. The lead gray of the sky mixed ever so slowly with black, finally blending into night. Just another quality of melancholy. As if there were only two colors in the world, gray and black, shifting back and forth at regular intervals.