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3056f54
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Why are you staring at me?" she'd ask. "'Cause you're pretty," I'd reply. "You're the first one who's ever said that." "I'm the only one who knows," I'd tell her. "And believe me, I know."
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Haruki Murakami |
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5d2771e
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A story is not something of this world. A real story requires a kind of magical baptism to link the world on this side with the world on the other side.
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Haruki Murakami |
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0f656c0
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The moon had been observing the earth close-up longer than anyone. It must have witnessed all of the phenomena occurring - and all of the acts carried out - on this earth. But the moon remained silent; it told no stories.
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Haruki Murakami |
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37945f3
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Listen--God only exists in people's minds. Especially in Japan, God's always been kind of a flexible concept. Look at what happened after the war. Douglas MacArthur ordered the divine emperor to quit being God, and he did, making a speech saying he was just an ordinary person. So after 1946 he wasn't God anymore. That's what Japanese gods are like--they can be tweaked and adjusted. Some American comping on a cheap pipe gives the order and p..
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Haruki Murakami |
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175b647
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That was the rule. Break one of my rules once, and I'm bound to break many more.
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Haruki Murakami |
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29f98ce
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There's only one kind of happiness, but misfortune comes in all shapes and sizes.
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Haruki Murakami |
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ad980cd
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En ese momento, por fin lo capto. En lo mas profundo de si mismo,Tsukuru Tazaki lo comprendio: los corazones humanos no se unen solo mediante la armonia. Se unen, mas bien, herida con herida. Dolor con dolor. Fragilidad con fragilidad. No existe silencio sin un grito desgarrador, no existe perdon sin que se derrame sangre, no existe aceptacion sin pasar por un intenso sentimiento de perdida. Esos son los cimientos de la verdadera armonia.
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Haruki Murakami |
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83900ac
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Most everything you think you know about me is nothing more than memories
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Haruki Murakami |
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c6afad4
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Where I went in my travels, it's impossible for me to recall. I remember the sights and sounds and smells clearly enough, but the names of the towns are gone, as well as any sense of the order in which I traveled from place to place.
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norwegian-wood
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Haruki Murakami |
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bea7093
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The world's crawling with stupid, innocent girls, and I'm just one of them, self-consciously chasing after dreams that will never come true.
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naivete
dreaming
innocence
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Haruki Murakami |
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43072c1
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But the silence spoke volumes.
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Haruki Murakami |
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9407276
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This is no honky-tonk parade. 1Q84 is the real world, where a cut draws real blood, where pain is real pain and fear is real fear. The moon in the sky is no paper moon.
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Haruki Murakami |
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41fd7e4
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I was dying. Like all the other people who live in this world.
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Haruki Murakami |
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72a7d84
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Like my hairstyle?" she asked. "It's great." "How great?" "Great enough to knock down all the trees in all the forests of the world."
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Haruki Murakami |
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80428f7
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Our worlds are all jumbled together--your world, my world, the sheepman's world. Sometimes they overlap and sometimes they don't.
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Haruki Murakami |
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cc60dd9
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But maybe that's the way it should be. Maybe working on the little things as dutifully and honestly as we can is how we stay sane when the world is falling apart.
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Haruki Murakami |
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27528cd
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Sometimes fate is like a small sandstorm that keeps changing directions. You change direction but the sandstorm chases you. You turn again, but the storm adjusts.
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Haruki Murakami |
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4a90498
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The heavy smell of flower petals stroked the walls of my lungs.
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Haruki Murakami |
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3990cd6
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In ancient times people weren't just male or female, but one of three types: male/male, male/female, or 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 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 spe..
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theory
religion
life
love
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Haruki Murakami |
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826d513
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Maybe in a few years I'll be able to explain things better, but after a few years it probably won't matter anymore, will it?
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Haruki Murakami |
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584a756
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It's basically impossible for everybody's justice to prevail or everybody's happiness to triumph, so chaos takes over.
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Haruki Murakami |
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ed66f65
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Inside him, twenty years dissolved and mixed into one complex, swirling whole. Everything that had accumulated over the years-- all he had seen, all the words he has spoken, all the values he had held-- all of it coalesced into one solid, thick pillar in his heart, the core of which was spinning like a potter's wheel. Wordlessly, Tengo observed the scene, as if watching the destruction and rebirth of a planet.
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Haruki Murakami |
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d128667
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That's evolution. Evolution's always hard. Hard and bleak. No such thing as happy evolution
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suffering
life
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Haruki Murakami |
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e37437d
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Do you think music has the power to change people? Like you listen to a piece and go through some major change inside?" Oshima nodded."Sure, that can happen. We have an experience--like a chemical reaction--that transforms something inside us. When we examine ourselves later on, we discover that all the standards we've lived by have shot up another notch and the world's opened up in unexpected ways. Yes, I've had that experience. Not often..
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Haruki Murakami |
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9ce37e0
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Like it or not, it's the society we live in. Even the standard of right and wrong has been subdivided, made sophisticated. Within good, there's fashionable good and unfashionable good, and ditto for bad. Within fashionable good, there's formal and then there's casual; there's hip, there's cool, there's trendy, there's snobbish. Mix 'n' match.
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morality
post-modern
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Haruki Murakami |
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a475ad7
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Being tough isn't in and of itself a bad thing. Looking back on it, though, I can see I was too used to being strong, and never tried to understand those who were weak. I was too used to being fortunate, and didn't try to understand those less fortunate. Too used to being healthy, and didn't try to understand the pain of those who weren't. Whenever I saw a person in trouble, somebody paralyzed by events, I decided it was entirely his fault-..
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understanding
weak
tough
healthy
fortunate
strong
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Haruki Murakami |
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8ed43a9
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People are born in order to live, right? But the longer I've lived, the more I've lost what's inside me - and ended up empty. And I bet the longer I live, the emptier, the more worthless, I'll become. Something's wrong with this picture. Life isn't supposed to turn out like this! Isn't it possible to shift direction, to change where I'm headed?
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Haruki Murakami |
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5527681
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However miserable your situation, there is always something to learn.
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Haruki Murakami |
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f42501a
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Judging from the spiderwebs clinging to it, the emergency stairway was hardly ever used. To each web clung a small black spider, patiently waiting for its small prey to come along. Not that the spiders had any awareness of being "patient". A spider had no special skill other than building its web, and no lifestyle choice other than sitting still. It would stay in one place waiting for its prey until, in the natural course of things, it shri..
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Haruki Murakami |
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ba1700c
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I may not look it, but I can be a very patient guy. And killing time is one of my specialities.
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Haruki Murakami |
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d00fd96
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Ideas are like beards. Men don't have them until they grow up. Somebody said that, but I can't remember who." "Voltaire," the younger man said. He rubbed his chin and smiled, a cheerful, unaffected smile. "Voltaire might be off the mark, though, when it comes to me. I have hardly any beard at all, but have loved thinking about things since I was a kid." His face was indeed smooth, with no hint of a beard. His eyebrows were narrow, but thick..
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Haruki Murakami |
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5ef2842
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Like a Chinese box, the world of the novel contained smaller worlds, and inside those were yet smaller worlds. Together, these worlds made up a single universe, and the universe waited there in the book to be discovered by the reader.
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Haruki Murakami |
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2454730
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I mean, the ones on trial are not like me in any way: they're a different kind of human being. They live in a different world, they think different thoughts, and their actions are nothing like mine. Between the world they live in and the world I live in there's this thick, high wall. At least, that's how I saw it at first. ...I became a lot less sure of myself. In other words, I started seeing it like this: that there really was no such thi..
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criminal
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Haruki Murakami |
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3c9c323
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All imperfections are forced upon the imperfect, so the 'perfect' can live content and oblivious.
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Haruki Murakami |
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324a757
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And when you come back to Japan next summer, let's have that date or whatever you want to call it. We can go to the zoo or the botanical garden or the aquarium, and then we'll have the most politically correct and scrumptious omelets we can find.
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Haruki Murakami |
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a460abd
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Well, finally, the events I've been through have been tremendously complicated. All kinds of characters have come on the scene, and strange things have happened one after another, to the point where, if I try to think about them in order, I lose track.
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Haruki Murakami |
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7fb797c
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He wasn't so bad when the two of us came to see you, though. He was just his usual self." Because you were there," said Naoko. "He was always like that around you. He struggled to keep his weaknesses hidden. I'm sure he was very fond of you. He made a point of letting you see only his best side. He wasn't like that with me. He'd let his guard down. He could be really moody. One minute he'd be chattering away, and the next thing he'd be depr..
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norwegian-wood
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Haruki Murakami |
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3f51637
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I often dream about the Dolphin Hotel.
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Haruki Murakami |
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18d9ca9
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Women are all born with a special, independent organ that allows them to lie. This was Dr. Tokai's personal opinion. It depends on the person, he said about the kind of lies they tell, what situation they tell them in, and how the lies are told. But at a certain point in their lives, all women tell lies, and they lie about important things. They lie about unimportant things, too, but they also don't hesitate to lie about the most important ..
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Haruki Murakami |
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ace0f50
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Exerting yourself to the fullest within your individual limits: that's the essence of running, and a metaphor for life---and for me, for writing as well.
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Haruki Murakami |
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5db4943
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Rain falls and the flowers bloom. No rain, they wither up. Bugs are eaten by lizards, lizards are eaten by birds. But in the end, every one of them dies. They die and dry up. One generation dies, and the next one takes over. That's how it goes. Lots of different ways to live. And lots of different ways to die. But in the end that doesn't make a bit of difference. All that remains is a desert.
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Haruki Murakami |
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3037bd5
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Whatever can't be expressed might as well not exist.
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Haruki Murakami |
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63786cc
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Look deep enough into any person and you will find something shining within.
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Haruki Murakami |
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a7bf5e7
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Person A understand Person B because the time is right for that to happen, not because Person B wants to be understood by Person A.
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understanding-others
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Haruki Murakami |