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12c5a1d
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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. Of course it's important to know what's right and what's wrong. Individual errors in judgment can usually be corrected. As long as you have the courage to admit mistakes, things can be turned around. But intolerant, narrow minds..
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Haruki Murakami |
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4c611f9
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Genius or fool, you don't live in the world alone. You can hide underground or you can build a wall around yourself, but somebody's going to come along and screw up the works.
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Haruki Murakami |
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132cc66
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Reality was utterly coolheaded and utterly lonely.
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Haruki Murakami |
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e7b993e
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Jealousy--at least as far as he understood it from his dream--was the most hopeless prison in the world. Jealousy was not a place he was forced into by someone else, but a jail in which the inmate entered voluntarily, locked the door, and threw away the key. And not another soul in the world knew he was locked inside. Of course if he wanted to escape he could do so. The prison, was after all, his own heart. But he couldn't make that decisio..
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Haruki Murakami |
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f39b600
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I guess I felt attached to my weakness. My pain and suffering too. Summer light, the smell of a breeze, the sound of cicadas - if I like these things, why should I apologize?
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human
cicadas
flaw
weakness
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Haruki Murakami |
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1e964ac
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I'm kind of a low-key guy. The spotlight doesn't suit me. I'm more of a side dish--cole slaw or French fries or a Wham! backup singer.
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Haruki Murakami |
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8ed27c7
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In this world, there is no absolute good, no absolute evil," the man said. "Good and evil are not fixed, stable entities, but are continually trading places. A good may be transformed into an evil in the next second. And vice versa. Such was the way of the world that Dostoevsky depicted in The Brothers Karamazov. The most important thing is to maintain the balance between the constantly moving good and evil. If you lean too much in either d..
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Haruki Murakami |
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e3a80dc
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According to Chekhov," Tamaru said, rising from his chair, "once a gun appears in a story, it has to be fired." "Meaning what?" "Meaning, don't bring unnecessary props into a story. If a pistol appears, it has to be fired at some point. Chekhov liked to write stories that did away with all useless ornamentation."
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Haruki Murakami |
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0ed6b56
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To keep on going, you have to keep up the rhythm.
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Haruki Murakami |
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0bd95b9
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Our faces were no more than ten inches apart but she was lightyears away from me.
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Haruki Murakami |
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bd8676f
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I know I have a pretty good sense for music, but she was better than me. I used to think it was such a waste! I thought, 'If only she had started out with a good teacher and gotten the proper training, she'd be so much further along!' But I was wrong about that. She was not the kind of child who could stand proper training. There just happen to be people like that. They're blessed with this marvelous talent, but they can't make the effort t..
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reiko
japanese
talent
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Haruki Murakami |
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3d8e1ad
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The strength I'm looking for isn't the type where you win or lose. I'm not after a wall that'll repel power coming from outside. What I want is the kind of strength to be able to absorb that kind of power, to stand up to it. The strength to quietly endure things - unfairness, misfortunes, sadness, mistakes, misunderstandings.
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Haruki Murakami |
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ba49c51
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There are three ways you can get along with a girl: one, shut up and listen to what she has to say; two, tell her you like what she's wearing; and three, treat her to really good food...If you do all that and still don't get the results you want, better give up.
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girls
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Haruki Murakami |
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653a39b
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It seemed to me that this world has a serious shortage of both logic and kindness.
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Haruki Murakami |
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f127b88
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No truth can cure the sadness we feel from losing a loved one. No truth, no sincerity, no strength, no kindness, can cure that sorrow. All we can do is see that sadness through to the end and learn something from it, but what we learn will be no help in facing the next sadness that comes to us without warning.
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warning
sorrow
kindness
learning
sadness
strength
truth
sincerity
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Haruki Murakami |
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68915b2
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Between the end of that strange summer and the approach of winter, my life went on without change. Each day would dawn without incident and end as it had begun. It rained a lot in September. October had several warm, sweaty days. Aside from the weather, there was hardly anything to distinguish one day from the next. I worked at concentrating my attention on the real and useful. I would go to the pool almost every day for a long swim, take w..
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Haruki Murakami |
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7207705
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Everything, everything seemed once-upon-a-time.
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Haruki Murakami |
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fe6483f
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most people in the world don't really use their brains to think. And people who don't think are the ones who don't listen to others.
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thinking
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Haruki Murakami |
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75fa6bc
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Every once in a while she'll get worked up and cry like that. But that's ok. She's letting her feelings out. The scary thing is not being able to do that. Then your feelings build up and harden and die inside. That's when you're in big trouble.
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norwegian-wook
murakami
japan
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Haruki Murakami |
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a537091
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Writing novels is much the same. You gather up bones and make your gate, but no matter how wonderful the gate might be, that alone doesn't make it a living breathing novel. 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 side.
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Haruki Murakami |
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d1d793d
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My peak? Would I even have one? I hardly had had anything you could call a life. A few ripples. some rises and falls. But that's it. Almost nothing. Nothing born of nothing. I'd loved and been loved, but I had nothing to show. It was a singularly plain, featureless landscape. I felt like I was in a video game. A surrogate Pacman, crunching blindly through a labyrinth of dotted lines. The only certainty was my death.
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death
featureless
pacman
peak
peaks
ripples
rising
video-games
labyrinth
nothing
falling
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Haruki Murakami |
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ddcb938
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It doesn't matter how old I get, but as long as I continue to live I'll always discover something new about myself.
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Haruki Murakami |
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0888aad
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You said you're going far away," Tamaru said. "How far away are we talking about?" "It's a distance that can't be measured." "Like the distance that separates one person's heart from another's."
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Haruki Murakami |
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6779dad
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Fairness is a concept that holds only in limited situations. Yet we want the concept to extend to everything, in and out of phase. From snails to hardware stores to married life. Maybe no one finds it, or even misses it, but fairness is like love. What is given has nothing to do with what we seek.
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Haruki Murakami |
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47fce94
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We truly believed in something back then, and we knew we were the kind of people capable of believing in something - with all our hearts. And that kind of hope will never simply vanish.
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hope
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Haruki Murakami |
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45bd78f
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I don't know -- maybe the world has two different kinds of people, and for one kind the world is this completely logical, rice pudding place, and for the other it's all hit-or-miss macaroni gratin.
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Haruki Murakami |
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af2cb05
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What I saw wasn't a ghost. It was simply--myself. I can never forget how terrified I was that night, and whenever I remember it, this thought always springs to mind: that the most frightening thing in the world is our own self. What do you think?
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Haruki Murakami |
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05aa739
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People leave traces of themselves where they feel most comfortable, most worthwhile.
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memories
love
nostalgia
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Haruki Murakami |
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40da839
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But metaphors help eliminate what separates you and me.
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Haruki Murakami |
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6c3abcc
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Precipitate as weather, she appeared from somewhere, then evaporated, leaving only memory.
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evaporation
memory
weather
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Haruki Murakami |
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57853ea
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Life is long, and sometimes cruel. Sometimes victims are needed. Someone has to take on that role. And human bodies are fragile, easily damaged. Cut them, and they bleed.
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Haruki Murakami |
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1ce0fdb
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You know what girls are like. They turn twenty or twenty-one and all of a sudden they start having these concrete ideas. They get super realistic. And when that happens, everything that seemed so sweet and lovable about them begins to look ordinary and depressing.
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Haruki Murakami |
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1682b8c
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The human heart is like a night bird. Silently waiting for something, and when the time comes, it flies straight toward it.
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Haruki Murakami |
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1427940
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Whenever I meet people for the first time, I get them to talk for ten minutes. Then I size them up from the exact opposite perspective of all they've told me. Do you think that's crazy? "No," I said, shaking my head, "I'd guess your method works quite well."
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Haruki Murakami |
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b725f09
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I realize now that the reality of things is not something you convey to people but something you make.
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Haruki Murakami |
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7227e12
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Look at the rain long enough, with no thoughts in your head, and you gradually feel your body falling loose, shaking free of the world of reality. Rain has the power to hypnotize.
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rain
reality
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Haruki Murakami |
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708cc23
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What I think is this: You should give up looking for lost cats and start searching for the other half of your shadow.
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kafka-on-the-shore
murakami
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Haruki Murakami |
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f5de91e
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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. Over and over you play this out, like some ominous dance with death just before dawn. Why? Because this storm isn't something that has nothing to do with you, This storm is you. Something inside you. So all you can do is give in to it, step right inside the storm, closing your eye..
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storm
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Haruki Murakami |
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692c98d
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My biggest fault is that the faults I was born with grow bigger each year.
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life
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Haruki Murakami |
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c72092e
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I'll be happy if running and I can grow old together.
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running
old-age
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Haruki Murakami |
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303ee82
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When I was fifteen, all I wanted was to go off to some other world, a place beyond anybody's reach. A place beyond the flow of time." - But there's no place like that in this world. - Exactly. Which is why I'm living here, in this world where things are continually damaged, where the heart is fickle, where time flows past without a break."
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Haruki Murakami |
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0ed170f
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After all this, I won't start to hate you.
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Haruki Murakami |
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b7686fd
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It's good when food tastes good, it's kind of like proof you're alive.
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Haruki Murakami |
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3081abc
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I used to think the years would go by in order, that you get older one year at a time. But it's not like that. It happens overnight.
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Haruki Murakami |