Quotes from Haruki Murakami

People die all the time. Life is a lot more fragile than we think. So you should treat others in a way that leaves no regrets. Fairly, and if possible, sincerely. It's too easy not to make the effort, then weep and wring your hands after the person dies. Personally, I don't buy it. Yuki leaned against the car door. But that's real hard, isn't it? she said. Real hard, I said. But it's worth trying for.

They tell us that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself, but I don't believe that,' he said. Then, a moment later, he added: 'Oh, the fear is there, all right. It comes to us in many different forms, at different times, and overwhelms us. But the most frightening thing we can do at such times is to turn our backs on it, to close our eyes. For then we take the most precious thing inside us and surrender it to something else.

Life doesn't require ideals. It requires standards of action.

1971 was the year of spaghetti. In 1971 I cooked spaghetti to live, and lived to cook spaghetti. Steam rising from the pot was my pride and joy, tomato sauce bubbling up in the saucepan my one great hope in life... This is the story from the Year of Spaghetti, AD 1971.

An imperfect person living an imperfect, limited life.

A person's life may be a lonely thing by nature, but it is not isolated. To that life other lives are linked.

a person's mind is controlled by his body, right? Or is it the opposite—the way your mind works influences the structure of the body? Or do the body and mind closely influence each other and act on each other? What I do know is that people have certain inborn tendencies, and whether a person likes them or not, they're inescapable. Tendencies can be adjusted, to a degree, but their essence can never be changed.

Becoming serious was not the same thing as approaching truth, I sensed, however vaguely. But death was a fact, a serious fact, no matter how you looked at it. Stuck inside this suffocating contradiction, I went on endlessly spinning in circles. Those were strange days, now that I look back at them. In the midst of life, everything revolved around death.

At nineteen, I knew nothing about the inner workings of my own heart, let alone the hearts of others. Still, I thought I had a pretty good grasp of how happiness and sadness worked. What I couldn't yet grasp were all the myriad phenomenon that lay in the space between happiness and sadness, how they related to each other. As a result, I often felt anxious and helpless.

The way I see it," Menshiki said, "there's a point in everybody's life where they need a major transformation. And when that time comes you have to grab it by the tail. Grab it hard, and never let go.

It was like a tight knot inside me was gradually loosening, a knot I'd never even realized, until then, was there.

Realizing all over again how important sunlight is to human beings, I appreciate each second of that precious light. The intense loneliness and helplessness I felt under those millions of stars has vanished

Cause in Alphaville, you're not allowed to have deep feelings. So there's nothing like love. No contradictions, no irony. They do everything according to numerical formulas." Kaoru wrinkles her brow. "'Irony'?" "Irony means taking an objective or inverted view of oneself or of someone belonging to oneself and discovering oddness in that.

It was a different sense of isolation from what he normally felt in Japan. And not such a bad feeling, he decided. Being alone in two senses of the word was maybe like a double negation of isolation. In other words, it made perfect sense for him, a foreigner, to feel isolated here. The thought calmed him. He was in exactly the right place.

Todo el mundo crece, lo quiera o no. Todos nos hacemos mayores, y así nos enfrentamos a nuestros problemas. Lidiamos con ellos hasta que morimos. Siempre ha sido así y siempre lo será. No eres la única que tiene problemas.

Champagne's completely useless, you know," he said. "The only good part is the moment you pop the cork.

I've been an outsider all my life. It's been kind of hard, but I like that way of living.

about life after divorce. Like you're walking along as always, sure you're on the right path, when the path suddenly vanishes, and you're facing an empty space, no sense of direction, no clue where to go, and you just keep trudging along. That's what it feels like.

En definitiva -así lo creo-, lo único que puedo verter en este receptáculo imperfecto que es un texto son recuerdos imperfectos, pensamientos imperfectos. (Tokio Blues. Norwegian wood - Traducción del japonés por Lourdes Porta)

It's all matter of attitude. You could let a lot of things bother you if you wanted to But it's pretty much the same anywhere you go, you can manage.

The ground we stand on looks solid enough, but if something happens it can drop right out from under you. And once that happens, you've had it: things'll never be the same. All you can do is go on living alone down there in the darkness.

The old temporality is losing its effectiveness and moving into the background. Many people go on mumbling the old words, but in the light of the newly revealed sun, the meanings of words are shifting rapidly and are being renewed. Even supposing that most of the new meanings are temporary things that will persist only through sundown that day, we will be spending time and moving forward with them.

The thought caused me a good deal of grief. What a terrible thing it is to wound someone you really care for - and to do it so unconsciously.

It is very difficult to logically explain the illogical.