Haruki Murakami

If your confusion leads you in the right direction, the results can be uncommonly rewarding.

— Haruki Murakami

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

— Haruki Murakami

Now for a good twelve-hour sleep, I told myself. Twelve solid hours. Let birds sing, let people go to work. Somewhere out there, a volcano might blow, Israeli commandos might decimate a Palestinian village. I couldn't stop it. I was going to sleep.

— Haruki Murakami

Kindness and a caring mind are two separate qualities. Kindness is manners. It is superficial custom, an acquired practice. Not so the mind. The mind is deeper, stronger, and, I believe, it is far more inconstant.

— Haruki Murakami

You said that the mind is like the wind, but perhaps it is we who are like the wind. Knowing nothing, simply blowing through. Never aging, never dying

— Haruki Murakami

Unclose your mind. You are not a prisoner. You are a bird in fight, searching the skies for dreams.

— Haruki Murakami

Once again, life had a lesson to teach me: It takes years to build up, it takes moments to destroy. Sure, I'd gotten tired of this tiny space, but I'd had a good home here. In the time it takes to swill two cans of beer, all had had sublimed like morning mist. My job, my whiskey, my peace and quiet, my solitude, my Sormerset Maugham, and John Ford collections-all of it trashed and worthless.

— Haruki Murakami

“That's wrong," she declared. "Everyone must have one thing that they can excel at. It's just a matter of drawing it out, isn't it? But school doesn't know how to draw it out. It crushes the gift. It's no wonder most people never get to be what they want to be. They just get ground down.”

— Haruki Murakami

You got to know your limits. Once is enough, but you got to learn. A little caution never hurt anyone. A good woodsman has only one scar on him. No more, no less.

— Haruki Murakami

You are not lost. It's just that your own thoughts are being kept from you, or hidden away. But the mind is strong. It survives even without thought. Even with everything taken away, it holds a seed-your self. You must believe in your powers.

— Haruki Murakami

First, about the mind. You tell me there is no fighting or hatred or desire in the Town. That this is a beautiful dream, and I do want your happiness. But the absence of fighting or hatred or desire also means the opposites do not exist either. No joy, no communion, no love. Only where there is disillusionment and depression and sorrow does happiness arise; without the despair of loss, there is no hope.

— Haruki Murakami

I don't go out of my way to make friends, that's all.

— Haruki Murakami

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.

— Haruki Murakami

If you're in pitch blackness, all you can do is sit tight until your eyes get used to the dark.

— Haruki Murakami

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.

— Haruki Murakami

If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking.

— Haruki Murakami

But who can say what's best? That's why you need to grab whatever chance you have of happiness where you find it, and not worry about other people too much. My experience tells me that we get no more than two or three such chances in a life time, and if we let them go, we regret it for the rest of our lives.

— Haruki Murakami

Money had no name of course. And if it did have a name, it would no longer be money. What gave money its true meaning was its dark-night namelessness, its breathtaking interchangeability.

— Haruki Murakami

But even so, every now and then I would feel a violent stab of loneliness. The very water I drink, the very air I breathe, would feel like long, sharp needles. The pages of a book in my hands would take on the threatening metallic gleam of razor blades. I could hear the roots of loneliness creeping through me when the world was hushed at 4 o'clock in the morning.

— Haruki Murakami

He inherited from his mother's stories the fundamental style he used, unaltered, in his own stories: namely, the assumption that fact may not be truth, and truth may not be factual.

— Haruki Murakami

If you can love someone with your whole heart, even one person, then there's salvation in life. Even if you can't get together with that person.

— Haruki Murakami

“I can bear any pain as long as it has meaning.”

— Haruki Murakami

That's the kind of death that frightens me. The shadow of death slowly, slowly eats away at the region of life, and before you know it everything's dark and you can't see, and the people around you think of you as more dead than alive.

— Haruki Murakami

That's what the world is, after all: an endless battle of contrasting memories.

— Haruki Murakami

I'm a very ordinary human being; I just happen to like reading books.

— Haruki Murakami

It is not that the meaning cannot be explained. But there are certain meanings that are lost forever the moment they are explained in words.

— Haruki Murakami

I'm tired of living unable to love anyone. I don't have a single friend - not one. And, worst of all, I can't even love myself. Why is that? Why can't I love myself? It's because I can't love anyone else. A person learns how to love himself through the simple acts of loving and being loved by someone else. Do you understand what I am saying? A person who is incapable of loving another cannot properly love himself.

— Haruki Murakami

I am nothing. I’m like someone who’s been thrown into the ocean at night, floating all alone. I reach out, but no one is there. I call out, but no one answers. I have no connection to anything.

— Haruki Murakami

You can hide memories, but you can't erase the history that produced them.

— Haruki Murakami

Mere humans who root through their refrigerators at three o'clock in the morning can only produce writing that matches what they do. And that includes me.

— Haruki Murakami

Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional.

— Haruki Murakami

Time expands, then contracts, all in tune with the stirrings of the heart.

— Haruki Murakami

People leave strange little memories of themselves behind when they die.

— Haruki Murakami

If you remember me, then I don't care if everyone else forgets.

— Haruki Murakami

Some people think literature is high culture and that it should only have a small readership. I don't think so... I have to compete with popular culture, including TV, magazines, movies and video games.

— Haruki Murakami

I’ve never once thought about how I was going to die,” she said. “I can’t think about it. I don’t even know how I’m going to live.

— Haruki Murakami

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.

— Haruki Murakami

A gentleman is someone who does not what he wants to do, but what he should do.

— Haruki Murakami

A gentleman is someone who does not what he wants to do, but what he should do.

— Haruki Murakami

As we go through life we gradually discover who we are, but the more we discover, the more we lose ourselves.

— Haruki Murakami

It's easy to forget things you don't need anymore.

— Haruki Murakami

Most people dream a dream when they are asleep. But to be a writer, you have to dream while you are awake, intentionally. So I get up early in the morning, 4 o'clock, and I sit at my desk and what I do is just dream. After three or four hours, that's enough. In the afternoon, I run. The next day, the dream will continue.

— Haruki Murakami

You know, they've got these chocolate assortments, and you like some but you don't like others? And you eat all the ones you like, and the only ones left are the ones you don't like as much? I always think about that when something painful comes up. Now I just have to

— Haruki Murakami

Those were strange days, now that I look back at them. In the midst of life, everything revolved around death.

— Haruki Murakami

Everything was too sharp and clear, so that I could never tell where to start- the way a map that shows too much can sometimes be useless.

— Haruki Murakami

Silence. How long it lasted, I couldn't tell. It might have been five seconds, it might have been a minute. Time wasn't fixed. It wavered, stretched, shrank. Or was it me that wavered, stretched, and shrank in the silence? I was warped in the folds of time, like a reflection in a fun house mirror.

— Haruki Murakami

Like most novelists, I like to do exactly the opposite of what I'm told. It's in my nature as a novelist. Novelists can't trust anything they haven't seen with their own eyes or touched with their own hands. (Jerusalem Prize acceptance speech, JERUSALEM POST, Feb. 15, 2009)

— Haruki Murakami

I find myself thinking about my ongoing existence as a human being and the path that lies ahead of me. Though of course these thoughts lead to but one place - death.

— Haruki Murakami

A poet might die at twenty-one, a revolutionary or a rock star at twenty four. But after that you assume everything’s going to be all right. you’ve made it past Dead Man’s Curve and you’re out of the tunnel, cruising straight for your destination down a six lane highway whether you want it or not.

— Haruki Murakami

It's easy to talk big, but the important thing is whether or not you clean up the shit.

— Haruki Murakami

I lost some of my friends because I got so famous, people who just assumed that I would be different now. I felt like everyone hated me. That is the most unhappy time of my life.

— Haruki Murakami

Unfortunately, the clock is ticking, the hours are going by. The past increases, the future recedes. Possibilities decreasing, regrets mounting.

— Haruki Murakami

Aren't you afraid of dying?

— Haruki Murakami

Time flows in strange ways on Sundays, and sights become mysteriously distorted.

— Haruki Murakami

In traveling, a companion, in life, compassion,'" she repeats, making sure of it. If she had paper and pencil, it wouldn't surprise me if she wrote it down. "So what does that really mean? In simple terms."

— Haruki Murakami

No matter how vivid memories may be, they can’t win out against the power of time.

— Haruki Murakami

I think history is collective memories. In writing, I'm using my own memory, and I'm using my collective memory.

— Haruki Murakami

Mere humans who root through their refrigerators at three o'clock in the morning can only produce writing that matches what they do. And that includes me.

— Haruki Murakami

I get up early in the morning, 4 o'clock, and I sit at my desk and what I do is just dream. After three or four hours, that's enough. In the afternoon, I run.

— Haruki Murakami

Life is here, death is over there. I am here, not over there.

— Haruki Murakami

The passage of time will usually extract the venom of most things and render them harmless

— Haruki Murakami

For a while" is a phrase whose length can't be measured.At least by the person who's waiting.

— Haruki Murakami

Death is not the opposite of life, but a part of it.

— Haruki Murakami

In traveling, a companion, in life, compassion,'" she repeats, making sure of it. If she had paper and pencil, it wouldn't surprise me if she wrote it down. "So what does that really mean? In simple terms."

— Haruki Murakami

If there's any guy crazy enough to attack me, I'm going to show him the end of the world -- close up. I'm going to let him see the kingdom come with his own eyes. I'm going to send him straight to the southern hemisphere and let the ashes of death rain all over him and the kangaroos and the wallabies.

— Haruki Murakami

And once the storm is over, you won’t remember how you made it through, how you managed to survive. You won’t even be sure, whether the storm is really over. But one thing is certain. When you come out of the storm, you won’t be the same person who walked in. That’s what this storm’s all about.

— Haruki Murakami

Among the many values in life, I appreciate freedom most.

— Haruki Murakami

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.

— Haruki Murakami

It's unfair."

— Haruki Murakami

I know how fiction matters to me, because if I want to express myself, I have to make up a story. Some people call it imagination. To me, it's not imagination. It's just a way of watching.

— Haruki Murakami

No truth can cure the sorrow 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 it through to the end and learn something from it, but what we learn will be no help in facing the next sorrow that comes to us without warning.

— Haruki Murakami

I lost some of my friends because I got so famous, people who just assumed that I would be different now. I felt like everyone hated me. That is the most unhappy time of my life.

— Haruki Murakami

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

According to Aristophanes in Plato's The Banquet, in the ancient world of legend there were three types of people.

— Haruki Murakami

People die all the time. Life is a lot more fragile than we think. So you should treat others in a way that leaves no regrets. Fairly, and if possible, sincerely. It's too easy not to make the effort, then weep and wring your hands after the person dies.

— Haruki Murakami

It may well be that we can never fully adapt to our own deformities. Unable to

— Haruki Murakami

When someone is trying very hard to get something, they don't. And when they're running away from something as hard as they can, it usually catches up with them.

— Haruki Murakami

You are 27 or 28 right? It is very tough to live at that age. When nothing is sure. I have sympathy with you.

— Haruki Murakami

Dying is the only way/ For you to float free: / Nomonhan

— Haruki Murakami

The clock shows 3 p.m., the two hands cold and distant. They're pretending to be non-committal, but I know they're not on my side.

— Haruki Murakami

Time really is one big continuous cloth, no? We habitually cut out pieces of time to fit us, so we tend to fool ourselves into thinking that time is our size, but it really goes on and on.

— Haruki Murakami

This is one more piece of advice I have for you: don't get impatient. Even if things are so tangled up you can't do anything, don't get desperate or blow a fuse and start yanking on one particular thread before it's ready to come undone. You have to realize it's going to be a

— Haruki Murakami

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.

— Haruki Murakami

And another important fact was this-I was not seeking all of her. Her entire being wouldn't fit, perhaps, in the small box I pos- sessed now. I was no longer a seventeen-year-old boy. Back then, I had all the time in the world. But not now. The time I have now, and the ways I can use it, have become so limited. What I sought now was the gentle warmth that lay inside, beneath her defensive wall. And the rhythmic beat of the heart that lay pulsing beneath.

— Haruki Murakami

And another important fact was this-I was not seeking all of her. Her entire being wouldn't fit, perhaps, in the small box I possessed now. I was no longer a seventeen-year-old boy. Back then, I had all the time in the world. But not now. The time I have now, and the ways I can use it, have become so limited. What I sought now was the gentle warmth that lay inside, beneath her defensive wall. And the rhythmic beat of the heart that lay pulsing beneath.

— Haruki Murakami

Of course, winning is much better than losing. No argument there. But winning or losing doesn’t affect the weight and value of the time. It’s the same time, either way. A minute is a minute, an hour is an hour. We need to cherish it. We need to deftly reconcile ourselves with time, and leave behind as many precious memories as we can -that’s what’s the most valuable.

— Haruki Murakami

Tell me, Doctor, are you afraid of death?"

— Haruki Murakami

Suicides? Heart attacks? The papers didn't seem interested. The world was full of ways to die, too many to cover. Newsworthy deaths had to be exceptional. Most people go unobserved.

— Haruki Murakami

On nights when I couldn't sleep, I could see his face. Like an unlucky premonition of something, his face floated up clearly in my head.

— Haruki Murakami

When you are used to the kind of life -of never getting anything you want- you stop knowing what it is you want.

— Haruki Murakami

I said this one day to the doctor in charge of my case, and he told me that, in a sense, what I was feeling was right, that we are in here not to correct the deformation but to accustom ourselves to it: that one of our problems was our inability to recognize and accept our own deformities. Just as each person has certain idiosyncrasies in the way he or she walks, people have idiosyncrasies in the way they think and feel and see things, … "

— Haruki Murakami

In a letter from Naoko, Norwegian Wood

— Haruki Murakami

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

— Haruki Murakami

Mediocrity is like a spot on your shirt, it never comes off.

— Haruki Murakami

But I didn't understand then. That I could hurt somebody so badly she would never recover. That a person can, just by living, damage another human being beyond repair.

— Haruki Murakami

Even castles in the sky can do with a fresh coat of paint.

— Haruki Murakami

Time weighs down on you like an old, ambiguous dream. You keep on moving, trying to sleep through it. But even if you go to the ends of the earth, you won't be able to escape it. Still, you have to go there- to the edge of the world. There's something you can't do unless you get there.

— Haruki Murakami

Death leaves cans of shaving cream half-used.

— Haruki Murakami

You burn barns. I don't burn barns. There's this glaring difference, and to me, rather than say which of us is strange, first of all I'd like to clear up just what that difference is.

— Haruki Murakami

Why do people have to be this lonely? What's the point of it all? Millions of people in this world, all of them yearning, looking to others to satisfy them, yet isolating themselves. Why? Was the earth put here just to nourish human loneliness?

— Haruki Murakami

You are a beautiful person, Doctor. Clearheaded. Strong. But you seem always to be dragging your heart along the ground. From now on, little by little, you must prepare yourself to face death. If you devote all of your future energy to living, you will not be able to die well. You must begin to shift gears, a little at a time. Living and dying are, in a sense, of equal value.

— Haruki Murakami

Numbers aren’t the important thing …\xa0what matters is deciding in your heart to accept another person completely. When you do that, it is always the first time and the last.

— Haruki Murakami

Seeing a lot of water like that every day is probably an important thing for human beings. For human beings might be a bit of a generalization—but I do know it’s important for one person: me. If I go for a time without seeing water, I feel like something’s slowly draining out of me. It’s probably like the feeling a music lover has when, for whatever reason, he’s separated from music for a long time. The fact that I was raised near the sea might have something to do with it.

— Haruki Murakami

The elevator continued its impossibly slow ascent. Or at least I imagined it was ascent. There was no telling for sure: it was so slow that all sense of direction simply vanished. It could have been going down for all I knew, or maybe it wasn’t moving at all. But let’s just assume it was going up. Merely a guess. Maybe I’d gong up twelve stories, then down three. Maybe I’d circled the globe. How would I know?

— Haruki Murakami