|
3684bf7
|
In the end, like so many beautiful promises in our lives, that dinner date never came to be.
|
|
novel
|
Haruki Murakami |
|
d33bb73
|
There is nothing in this world that never takes a step outside a person's heart.
|
|
honesty
love
internal-self
intent
secrets
|
Haruki Murakami |
|
7e364d5
|
Some things, you know, if you say them, it makes them not true?
|
|
|
Haruki Murakami |
|
88440e0
|
It was as if I were writing letters to hold together the pieces of my crumbling life.
|
|
|
Haruki Murakami |
|
1d43869
|
These days I just can't seem to say what I mean,' she said. 'I just can't. Every time I try to say something, it misses the point. Either that or I end up saying the opposite of what I mean. The more I try to get it right the more mixed up it gets. Sometimes I can't even remember what I was trying to say in the first place. It's like my body's split in two and one of me is chasing the other me around a big pillar. We're running circles arou..
|
|
|
Haruki Murakami |
|
ed1b4d8
|
Friends don't need the intervention of a third party. Friendship's a voluntary thing.
|
|
|
Haruki Murakami |
|
bff94ff
|
Generally, people who are good at writing letters have no need to write letters. They've got plenty of life to lead inside their own context.
|
|
writing
|
Haruki Murakami |
|
af0793d
|
A life without pain: it was the very thing I had dreamed of for years, but now that I had it, I couldn't find a place for myself within it. A clear gap separated me from it, and this caused me great confusion. I felt as if I were not anchored to this world - this world that I had hated so passionately until then; this world that I had continued to revile for its unfairness and injustice; this world where at least I knew who I was. Now the w..
|
|
|
Haruki Murakami |
|
3f21187
|
Symbolism and meaning are two separate things. I think she found the right words by bypassing procedures like meaning and logic. She captured words in a dream, like delicately catching hold of a butterfly's wings as it flutters around. Artists are those who can evade the verbose.
|
|
|
Haruki Murakami |
|
aea6f57
|
She was, if anything, on the plain side, at least not the type to attract men wherever she went. But there was something in her face that was meant for me alone. Everytime we met, I took a good look at her. And loved what I saw.
|
|
yukiko
|
Haruki Murakami |
|
d294855
|
In the spring of her twenty-second year, Sumire fell in love for the first time in her life.
|
|
|
Haruki Murakami |
|
1f89eff
|
Cell phones are so convenient that they're an inconvenience.
|
|
|
Haruki Murakami |
|
0afae40
|
I'm all alone, but I'm not lonely.
|
|
loneliness
aomame
|
Haruki Murakami |
|
48da8f1
|
Your work should be an act of love, not a marriage of convenience.
|
|
|
Haruki Murakami |
|
b97899b
|
Let's say you are an empty vessel. So what? What's wrong with that?" Eri said. "You're still a wonderful, attractive vessel. And really, does anybody know who they are? So why not be a completely beautiful vessel? The kind people feel good about, the kind people want to entrust with precious belongings."
|
|
|
Haruki Murakami |
|
a978e23
|
An unhealthy soul requires a healthy body.
|
|
|
Haruki Murakami |
|
aeb4950
|
I get irritated, I get upset. Especially when I'm in a hurry. But I see it all as part of our training. To get irritated is to lose our way in life.
|
|
|
Haruki Murakami |
|
70e4463
|
Listen, Kafka. What you're experiencing now is the motif of many Greek tragedies. Man doesn't choose fate. Fate chooses man. That's the basic worldview of Greek drama. And the sense of tragedy--according to Aristotle--comes, ironically enough, not from the protagonist's weak points but from his good qualities. Do you know what I'm getting at? People are drawn deeper into tragedy not by their defects but by their virtues. Sophocles' Oedipus ..
|
|
|
Haruki Murakami |
|
555cb42
|
Such wounds to the heart will probably never heal. But we cannot simply sit and stare at our wounds forever.
|
|
|
Haruki Murakami |
|
07fa209
|
The world of the grotesque is the darkness within us. Well before Freud and Jung shined a light on the workings of the subconscious, this correlation between darkness and our subconscious, these two forms of darkness, was obvious to people. It wasn't a metaphor, even. If you trace it back further, it wasn't even a correlation. Until Edison invented the electric light, most of the world was totally covered in darkness. The physical darkness ..
|
|
|
Haruki Murakami |
|
613c6b2
|
Every one of us is losing something precious to us... Lost opportunities, lost possibilities, feelings we can never get back again. That's what part of it means to be alive. But inside our heads- at least that's where I imagine it- there's a litle room where we store those memories. A room like the stacks in this library. And to understand the workings of our own heart we have to keep on making new reference cards. We have to dust things of..
|
|
|
Haruki Murakami |
|
ff3c6e0
|
Will you wait for me forever?
|
|
|
Haruki Murakami |
|
e98b038
|
People have their own reasons for dying. It might look simple, but it never is. It's just like a rock. What's above ground is only a small part of it. But if you start pulling, it keeps coming and coming. The human mind dwells deep in darkness. Only the person himself knows the real reason, and maybe not even then.
|
|
|
Haruki Murakami |
|
4db9cd7
|
Where there is light, there must be shadow, where there is shadow there must be light. There is no shadow without light and no light without shadow.... We do not know if the so-called Little People are good or evil. This is, in a sense, something that surpasses our understanding and our definitions. We have lived with them since long, long ago-- from a time before good and evil even existed, when people's minds were still benighted.
|
|
|
Haruki Murakami |
|
a34309f
|
Loving another person is a wonderful thing, and if that love is sincere, no one ends up tossed into a labyrinth. You have to have more faith in yourself.
|
|
truth
loving
sincerity
|
Haruki Murakami |
|
8d33104
|
Everyone who has something is afraid of losing it, and people with nothing are worried they'll forever have nothing. Everyone is the same.
|
|
|
Haruki Murakami |
|
25c5319
|
Like dry ground welcoming the rain, he let the solitude, silence, and loneliness soak in.
|
|
|
Haruki Murakami |
|
ff29656
|
I don't think most people would like my personality. There might be a few--very few, I would imagine--who are impressed by it, but only rarely would anyone like it. Who in the world could possibly have warm feelings, or something like them, for a person who doesn't compromise, who instead, whenever a problem crops up, locks himself away alone in a closet? But is it ever possible for a professional writer to be liked by people? I have no ide..
|
|
|
Haruki Murakami |
|
c411af0
|
Forgive me for stating the obvious, but the world is made up of all kinds of people.
|
|
|
Haruki Murakami |
|
aefb9dd
|
Did you ever see anyone shot by a gun without bleeding?
|
|
|
Haruki Murakami |
|
afa6ee4
|
Most human activities are predicated on the assumption that life goes on. If you take that premise away, what is there left?
|
|
|
Haruki Murakami |
|
e98ef11
|
Sometimes I feel like a caretaker of a museum -- a huge, empty museum where no one ever comes, and I'm watching over it for no one but myself.
|
|
|
Haruki Murakami |
|
88218c1
|
The fact that I'm me and no one else is one of my greatest assets. Emotional hurt is the price a person has to pay in order to be independent.
|
|
|
Haruki Murakami |
|
b65d67a
|
Once, when I was younger, I thought I could be someone else. I'd move to Casablanca, open a bar, and I'd meet Ingrid Bergman. Or more realistically - whether actually more realistic or not - I'd tune in on a better life, something more suited to my true self. Toward that end, I had to undergo training. I read The Greening of America, and I saw Easy Rider three times. But like a boat with a twisted rudder, I kept coming back to the same plac..
|
|
|
Haruki Murakami |
|
a87eb8f
|
I was twenty-one at the time, about to turn twenty-two. No prospect of graduating soon, and yet no reason to quit school. Caught in the most curiously depressing circumstances. For months I'd been stuck, unable to take one step in any new direction. The world kept moving on; I alone was at a standstill. In the autumn, everything took on a desolate cast, the colors swiftly fading before my eyes. The sunlight, the smell of the grass, the fain..
|
|
|
Haruki Murakami |
|
56c5ac0
|
The fresh smell of coffee soon wafted through the apartment, the smell that separates night from day.
|
|
|
Haruki Murakami |
|
b710750
|
In the spring of her twenty-second year, Sumire fell in love for the first time in her life. An intense love, a veritable tornado sweeping across the plains--flattening everything in its path, tossing things up in the air, ripping them to shreds, crushing them to bits. The tornado's intensity doesn't abate for a second as it blasts across the ocean, laying waste to Angkor Wat, incinerating an Indian jungle, tigers and everything, transformi..
|
|
love
monumental
tornado
intensity
|
Haruki Murakami |
|
06e2519
|
Eleven o'clock had come and gone. I had to find a way to bring this conversation to a successful conclusion and get out of there. But before I could say anything, she suddenly asked me to hold her. 'Why?' I asked, caught off guard. 'To charge my batteries,' she said. 'Charge your batteries?' 'My body has run out of electricity. I haven't been able to sleep for days now. The minute I get to sleep I wake up, and then I can't get back to sleep..
|
|
|
Haruki Murakami |
|
6c17cb0
|
It's like a kid standing at the window watching the rain.
|
|
|
Haruki Murakami |
|
2ab84e1
|
The world isn't that easily turned upside down, Haida replied. It's people who are turned upside down.
|
|
|
Haruki Murakami |
|
f16e2b0
|
This may be the most important proposition revealed by history: 'At the time, no one knew what was coming.
|
|
history
prescience
|
Haruki Murakami |
|
3e6e5a1
|
She was the kind of person who took care of things by herself. She'd never ask anybody for advice or help. It wasn't a matter of pride, I think. She just did what seemed natural to her.
|
|
norwegian-wood
|
Haruki Murakami |
|
a46d58c
|
Perhaps most people in the world aren't trying to be free, Kafka. They just think they are. It's all an illusion. If they really were set free, most people would be in a real pickle. You'd better remember that. People actually prefer not being free?
|
|
|
Haruki Murakami |
|
5ab236b
|
Any one who falls in love is searching for the missing pieces of themselves. So anyone who's in love gets sad when they think of their lover. It' like stepping back inside a room you have fond memories of, one you haven't seen in a long time. It's just a natural feeling. You're not the person who discovered that feeling, so don't try to patent it, okay?
|
|
|
Haruki Murakami |