Haruki Murakami Reality Quotations

What we needed were not words and promises but a steady accumulation of small realities.

That's gotta be one of the principles behind reality. Accepting things that are hard to comprehend, and leaving them that way.

And her sleep was too long and deep for that:so deep that she left her normal reality behind.

There are symbolic dreams-- dreams that symbolize some reality. Then there are symbolic realities -- realities that symbolize a dream. Symbols are what you might call the honorary town councillors of the worm universe. In the worm universe, there is nothing unusual about a dairy cow seeking a pair of pliers. A cow is bound to get her pliers sometime. It has nothing to do with me.

The best way to think about reality, I had decided, was to get as far away from it as possible.

The honour of physical decline is waiting, and you have to get used to that reality.

Reality's just the accumulation of ominous prophecies come to life. All you have to do is open a newspaper on any given day to weigh the good news versus the bad news, and you'll see what I mean.

I'm not afraid to die. What I'm afraid of is having reality get the better of me, of having reality leave me behind.

In dreams you don't need to make any distinctions between things. Not at all. Boundaries don't exist. So in dreams there are hardly ever collisions. Even if there are, they don't hurt. Reality is different. Reality bites. Reality, reality.

I realize now that the reality of things is not something you convey to people but something you make.

In order to pin down reality as realilty, we need another reality to relativize the first. Yet that other reality requires a third reality to serve as its grounding. An endless chain is created within our consciousness, and it is the maintenance of this chain which produces the sensation that we are actually here, that we ourselves exist.

Don't let appearances fool you. There's always only one reality!

Things may look different to you than they did before. I've had that experience myself. But don't let appearances fool you. There's only one reality.

It's just that you're about to do something out of the ordinary. And after you do something like that, the everyday look of things might seem to change a little. Things may look different to you than they did before. But don't let appearances fool you. There's always only one reality.

We were, the two of us, still fragmentary beings, just beginning to sense the presence of an unexpected, to be-aquired reality that would fill us and make us whole.

It depends on which reality you take and which reality I take.” (p. 318).

Strong and independent? I’m neither. I’m just being pushed along by reality, whether I like it or not.

The better you were able to imagine what you wanted to imagine, the farther you could flee from reality.

I was reduced to pure concept. My flesh had dissolved; my form had dissipated. I floated in space. Liberated of my corporeal being, but without dispensation to go anywhere else.I was adrift in the void. Somewhere across the fine line separating nightmare from reality.

Narrow minds devoid of imagination. Intolerance, theories cut off from reality, empty terminology, usurped ideals, inflexible systems. Those are the things that really frighten me. What I absolutely fear and loathe.

Reality was utterly coolheaded and utterly lonely.

If only I could fall sound asleep and wake up in my old reality!

It's hard to tell the difference between sea and sky, between voyager and sea. Between reality and the workings of the heart.

Wasn't it better if they kept this desire to see each other hidden within them, and never actually got together? That way, there would always be hope in their hearts. That hope would be a small, yet vital flame that warmed them to their core-- a tiny flame to cup one's hands around and protect from the wind, a flame that the violent winds of reality might easily extinguish.

We're both looking at the same moon, in the same world. We're connected to reality by the same line. All I have to do is quietly draw it towards me.