Haruki Murakami Quotations | Page 4

I often recall these words when I am writing, and I think to myself, “It’s true. There aren’t any new words. Our job is to give new meanings and special overtones to absolutely ordinary words.” I find the thought reassuring. It means that vast, unknown stretches still lie before us, fertile territories just waiting for us to cultivate them.

Everything just blows me away.

Far away, I could hear them lapping up my brains. Like Macbeth's witches, the three lithe cats surrounded my broken head, slurping up that thick soup inside. The tips of their rough tongues licked the soft folds of my mind. And with each lick my consciousness flickered like a flame and faded away.

Perhaps I'm just too painstaking a type of person, but I can't grasp much of anything without putting down my thoughts in writing.

Fate seems to be taking me in some even stranger directions.

Everything has boundaries. the same holds true with thought. you shouldn't fear boundaries, but you also should not be afraid of destroying them. that's what is most important if you want to be free: respect for and exasperation with boundaries. what's really important in life is always the things that are secondary.

Never let the darkness or negativity outside affect your inner self. Just wait until morning comes and the bright light will drown out the darkness.

A state of chronic powerlessness eats away at a person

Sometimes it's not the people who change, it's the mask that falls off.

[But] we accept irony through a device called metaphor. And through that we grow and become deeper human beings.

Cell phones are so convenient that they're an inconvenience.

Since I'm a novelist I'm the opposite of you - I believe that what's most important is what cannot be measured. I'm not denying your way of thinking, but the greater part of people's lives consist of things that are unmeasurable, and trying to change all these to something measurable is realistically impossible.

In any case, suffice it to say I enjoyed hearing about faraway places. I had stocked up a whole store of these places, like a bear getting ready for hibernation. I'd close my eyes, and streets would materialize, rows of houses take shape. I could hear people's voices, feel the gentle, steady rhythm of their lives, those people so distant, whom I'd probably never know.

There wasn't a cloud in the sky, no wind, and everything was quiet around us - all we could hear were birds chirping in the woods. The war seemed like something in a faraway land that had nothing to do with us. We sang songs as we hiked up the hill, sometimes imitating the birds we heard. Except for the fact that the war was still going on, it was a perfect morning.

Reaching the finish line, never walking, and enjoying the race. These three, in this order, are my goals.

No matter how honestly you open up to someone, there are still things you cannot reveal.

While they're still alive, people can become ghosts.

You know, eating's much more important than most people think. There comes a time in your life when you've just got to have something super-delicious. And when you're standing at that crossroads your whole life can change, depending on which one you go into - the good restaurant or the awful one.

Rousseau defined civilizations as when people build fences.

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

Sex is an extremely subtle undertaking, unlike going to the department store on a Sunday to buy a thermos.

...I've just been feeling insecure since I was 20, and that's all I've been trying to express. Now the entire world is feeling insecure.

You can hide as cleverly as you like, but in the final analysis mimicry is deception, pure and simple. It doesn't solve a thing.

Ever since time began (when was that, I wonder?), it's been moving ever forward without a moment's rest. And one of the privileges given to those who've avoided dying young is the blessed right to grow old.

If we reverse the outer shell and the essence--in other words, consider the outer shell the essence and the essence only the shell--our lives might be a whole lot easier to understand.

In ancient times, people weren't just male or female, but one of three types: male/male, male/female, female/female. In other words, each person was made out of the components of two people. Everyone was happy with this arrangement and never really gave it much a thought. But then God took a knife and cut everybody in half, right down the middle. So after that the world was divided just into male and female, the upshot being that people spend their time running around trying to locate their missing other half.

Sometimes we don't need words. Rather, it's words that need us.

And as we live our lives we discover - drawing toward us the thin threads attached to each - what has been lost. I closed my eyes and tried to bring to mind as many beautiful lost things as I could. Drawing them closer, holding on to them.

I myself, as I'm writing, don't know who did it. The readers and I are on the same ground. When I start to write a story, I don't know the conclusion at all and I don't know what's going to happen next. If there is a murder case as the first thing, I don't know who the killer is. I write the book because I would like to find out. If I know who the killer is, there's no purpose to writing the story.

Nights without work I spend with whisky and books.

If, as the dowager had said, we are nothing but gene carriers, why do so many of us have to lead such strangely shaped lives? Wouldn't our genetic purpose-to transmit DNA-be served just as well if we lived simple lives, not bothering our heads with a lot of extraneous thoughts, devoted entirely to preserving life and procreating? Did it benefit the genes in any way for us to lead such intricately warped, even bizarre, lives?

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)

It was a narrow world, a world that was standing still. But the narrower it became, the more it betook of stillness, the more this world that enveloped me seemed to overflow with things and people that could only be called strange. They had been there all the while, it seemed, waiting in the shadows for me to stop moving. And every time the wind-up bird came to my yard to wind its spring, the world descendedmore deeply into chaos.

You know, the usual story. Once upon a time I was playing my harp by a spring when a fairy appeared out of nowhere, handed me a Beretta Model 92, and told me to shoot the white rabbit over there for target practice.

The best thing would be to break your neck, but you'd probably just break your leg and then you couldn't do a thing. You'd yell at the top of your lungs, but nobody;d hear you, and you couldn't expect anybody to find you, and you'd have centipedes and spiders crawling all over you, and the bones of the ones who died before are scattered all around you, and it's dark and soggy, and way overhead there's this tiny, tiny circle of light like a winter moon. You die there in this place, little by little, all by yourself.

We can, if we so choose, wander aimlessly over the continent of the arbitrary. Rootless as some winged seed blown about on a serendipitous spring breeze.

Two-thirds of earth's surface is ocean, and all we can see with the naked eye is the surface.

Good style happens in one of two ways: the writer either has an inborn talent or is willing to work herself to death to get it.

Certain kinds of knowledge rob people of their sleep.

My point is: in this whole wide world the only person you can depend on is you.

I always feel like I'm struggling to become someone else. Like I'm trying to find a new place, grab hold of a new life, a new personality. I guess it's part of growing up; it's also an attempt to reinvent myself.

I never plan. I never know what the next page is going to be..... But that's the fun of writing a novel or a story, because I don't know what's going to happen next.

You could be anybody when you're writing. That's the reason that I'm writing: to be anybody. You can put your feet in various shoes and experience anything.

The world would be a pretty dull place if it were made up only of the first-rate, right?

The house kept its own time, like the old-fashioned grandfather clock in the living room. People who happened by raised the weights, and as long as the weights were wound, the clock continued ticking away. But with people gone and the weights unattended, whole chunks of time were left to collect in deposits of faded life on the floor.

As I already explaned, I don't have any form. I'm a conceptual metaphysical object.

When you're young, you think you can handle anything. By the time you find out otherwise, it's already too late. You got a stocking wrapped around your neck.

Of course you got rights, the law's on your side, but sometimes the law takes a long time to kick in and so it gets put in the hands of us poor suckers on duty. You get my drift?

I bet the reason people are afraid of going bald is because it makes them think of the end of life. I mean, when your hair starts to thin, it must feel as if your life is being worn away ... as if you've taken a giant step in the direction of death, the last Big Consumption.

Most of what I know about writing I've learned through running every day.

Writing a long novel is like survival training. Physical strength is as necessary as artistic sensitivity.

Not everything was lost in the flow of time

One heart is not connected to another through harmony alone. They are, instead, linked deeply through their wounds

No matter what the situation may be, I still take pleasure in witnessing the joy of others.

Do you know what ‘Sputnik’ means in Russian? ‘Travelling companion’. I looked it up in a dictionary not long ago. Kind of a strange coincidence if you think about it. I wonder why the Russians gave their satellite that strange name. It’s just a poor little lump of metal, spinning around the Earth.

If she did experience sex-or something close to it-in high school, I'm sure it would have been less out of sexual desire or love than literary curiosity.

It is very simple, actually. It is because you and Tengo were so powerfully drawn to each other.

"I believe you," she whispers after a moment. "Please find my mind."

I think memory is the most important asset of human beings. It's a kind of fuel; it burns and it warms you. My memory is like a chest: There are so many drawers in that chest, and when I want to be a fifteen-year-old boy, I open up a certain drawer and I find the scenery I saw when I was a boy in Kobe. I can smell the air, and I can touch the ground, and I can see the green of the trees. That's why I want to write a book.

There's no sense forcing yourself if you don't feel like it. Tell you the truth, I've had sex with lots of guys, but I think I did it mostly out of fear. I was scared not to have somebody putting his arms around me, so I could never say no. That's all. Nothing good ever came of sex like that. All it does is grind down the meaning of life a piece at a time.

I'm not human. I'm a piece of machinery. I don't need to feel a thing. Just forge on ahead.

Not that running away's going to solve everything. I don't want to rain on your parade or anything, but I wouldn't count on escaping this place if I were you. No matter how far you run. Distance might not solve anything.

What gave money its true meaning was its dark-night namelessness, its breathtaking interchangeability.

I have no idea! I have been writing for 35 years and from the beginning up to now the situation's almost the same. I'm kind of an ugly duckling. Always the duckling, never the swan.

I just feel pain. A lot of pain. I thought I could imagine how much this would hurt but I was wrong.

Everything. Things you lost. Things you’re gonna lose. Everything. Here’s where it all ties together.

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

Maybe the star doesnt even exist any more.Yet sometimes that light seems more real to me than anything.

The facts and techniques or whatever they teach you in class isn't going to be veryuseful in the real world, that's for sure.

The grounds of the place were dominated by several large, old willow trees that towered over the surrounding stone wall and swayed soundlessly in the wind like lost souls.

Writing talent is similar to the art of chatting up a girl. You can improve to a certain degree through practice, but basically you are either born with it or you aren't.

If I used being busy as an excuse not to run, I'd never run again. I have only a few reasons to keep on running, and a truckload of them to quit.

The good thing about writing book is that you can dream while you are awake...

Dreaming is the day job of novelists, but sharing our dreams is a still more important task for us. We cannot be novelists without this sense of sharing something.

My face, my self, what would they mean to anybody? Just another stiff. So this self of mine passes some other's self on the street - what do we have to say to each other? Hey there! Hi ya!That's about it. Nobody raises a hand. No one turns around to take another look.

Maybe time is nothing at all like a straight line. Perhaps it's shaped like a twisted doughnut. But for tens of thousands of years, people have probably been seeing time as a straight line that continues on forever. And that's the concept they based their actions on. And until now they haven't found anything inconvenient or contradictory about it. So as an experiential model, it's probably correct.

There's an essential order you have to follow in everything. It's a way of showing respect, following everything in the correct order.

Life might just be an absurd, even crude, chain of events and nothing more.

I generally concentrate on work for three or four hours every morning. I sit at my desk and focus totally on what I’m writing. I don’t see anything else, I don’t think about anything else.

It's just like sex; when [a book is] finished, it's finished.

I wander though China. Without ever having boarded a plane. My travels take place here in the Tokoyo subways, in the backseat of a taxi... all of a sudden this city will start to go. In a flash, the buildings will crumble. Over the Tokyo streets will fall my China, like ash, leaching into everything it touches. Slowly, gradually, until nothing remains. No, this isn't a place for me.

Grandfather always said school’s a place where they take sixteen years to wear down your brain. Grandfather hardly went to school either.

But I found that the longer you teach, the more you feel like a total stranger to yourself

I can't understand nothingness. I can't understand it and I can't imagine it.

Even when I ran my bar I followed the same policy. A lot of customers came to the bar. If one in ten enjoyed the place and said he'd come again, that was enough. If one out of ten was a repeat customer, then the business would survive. To put it another way, it didn't matter if nine out of ten didn't like my bar. This realization lifted a weight off my shoulders. Still, I had to make sure that the one person who did like the place.

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 write weird stories. I don't know why I like weirdness so much ... But when I write, I write weird. That's very strange. When I'm getting more and more serious, I'm getting more and more weird.

Colours shone with exceptional clarity in the rain. The ground was a deep black, the pine branches a brilliant green, the people wrapped in yellow looking like special spirits that were allowed to wander over the earth on rainy mornings only.

I tell you, Mr. Okada, a cold beer at the end of the day is the best thing life has to offer. Some choosy people say that a too cold beer doesn't taste good, but I couldn't disagree more. The first beer should be so cold you can't even taste it. The second one should be a little less chilled, but I want that first one to be like ice. I want it to be so cold my temples throb with pain. This is my own personal preference of course.

You're not a kid anymore. You have the right to choose your own life. You can start again. If you want a cat, all you have to do is choose a life in which you can have a cat. It's simple. It's your right.

Killing time is not an easy job.

I would never see her again, except in memory. She was here, and now she's gone. There is no middle ground. Probably is a word that you may find south of the border. But never, ever west of the sun.

If you think of someone enough, you’re sure to meet them again.

I couldn't tell wether the hole that opened up inside me was from missing you or from the change of season

Many are the women who can take their clothes off seductively, but women who can charm as they dress?

Whatever can't be expressed might as well not exist.

Deep rivers run quiet.

You’re here,” I continued. “At least you look as if you’re here. But maybe you aren’t. Maybe it’s just your shadow. The real you may be someplace else. Or maybe you already disappeared, a long, long time ago. I reach out my hand to see, but you’ve hidden yourself behind a cloud of probablys. Do you think we can go on like this forever?

I'm not trying to imply I can keep up this silent, isolated facade all the time. Sometimes the wall I've erected around me comes crumbling down. It doesn't happen very often, but sometimes, before I even realize what's going on, there I am--naked and defenseless and totally confused. At times like that I always feel an omen calling out to me, like a dark, omnipresent pool of water. ~page 10

When the orbits of these two satellites of ours happened to cross paths, we could be together. Maybe even open our hearts to each other. But that was only for the briefest moment. In the next instant we'd be in absolute solitude. Until we burned up and became nothing.