Haruki Murakami

“If you look at things from a distance, most anything looks beautiful.”

“If a person would just make the effort, there's something to be learned from everything. From even the most ordinary, commonplace things, there's always something you can learn.”

“If you can let it go at not understanding, that's the best anyone could expect.”

“The world's full of groundless ill will. I'll never understand it, you'll never understand it, but it exists all the same.”

“An old cat is a good friend to talk to.”

“A golf course can be a very risky place in the early evening for those who aren't aware of the dangers. Who knows when a golf ball might come flying out of nowhere?”

“So many dreams, so many disappointments, so many promises. And in the end, they all just vanish.”

“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.”

“Happiness is a warm friendship.”

“Phone calls in the dead of the night never brought good news.”

“Everything in life is a metaphor.”

“Friends don't need the intervention of a third party. Friendship's a voluntary thing.”

“Manchmal denke ich, das Herz eines Menschen ist wie ein tiefer Brunnen. Niemand weiß, was auf seinem Grund ist. Man kann es sich nur anhand der Dinge vorstellen, die bisweilen an die Oberfläche treiben.”

“Writers have to keep on writing if they want to mature, like caterpillars endlessly chewing on leaves.”

“No. 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.”

“September 1973, that's where this novel begins. That's the entrance. We'll just hope there's an exit. If there isn't one, there wouldn't be any point in writing anything.”

“Where there's an entrance, there's got to be an exit. Most things work that way.”

“To tell you the truth, sleepless nights are as unusual for me as sumo wrestlers who look good in berets.”

“Or maybe the ... shock of it started me covering up all kinds of memories the way a squirrel hides a nut and forgets where he's buried it.”

“Of course you keep telling yourself there's something to be learned from everything, and growing old shouldn't be that hard. That's the general drift.”

“Don’t you see? You and he might never cross paths again. Of course, a chance meeting could occur, and I hope it happens. I really do, for your sake. But realistically speaking, you have to see there’s a huge possibility you’ll never be able to meet him again. And even if you do meet, he might already be married to somebody else. He might have two kids. Isn’t that so? And in that case, you may have to live the rest of your life alone, never being joined with the one person you love in all the world. Don’t you find that scary?”

“When people tell a lie about something, they have to make up a bunch of lies to go with the first one. ‘Mythomania’ is the word for it.”

“People lose fifty million skin cells every day. The cells get scraped off and turn into invisible dust, and disappear into the air. Maybe we are nothing but skin cells as far as the world is concerned.”

“It's not me but the world that's deranged.”

“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 shriveled up and died. This was all genetically predetermined. The spider had no confusion, no despair, no regrets. No metaphysical doubt, no moral complications. Probably. Unlike me. I move,therefore I am.”

“A person’s destiny is something you look back at afterwards, not something to be known in advance.”

“I am, indeed, pure Frog, but at the same time I am a thing that stands for a world of un-Frog.”

“But tomorrow I'll be a different person, never again the person I was. Not that anyone will notice after I'm back in Japan. On the outside nothing will be different. But something inside has burned up and vanished. Blood has been shed, and something inside me is gone. Head down, without a word, that something makes its exit. The door opens; the door shuts. The light goes out. This is the last day for the person I am right now. The very last twilight. When dawn comes, the person I am won't be here anymore. Someone else will occupy this body.”

“On the flip side of everything we think we absolutely have pegged lurks an equal amount of the unknown. Understanding is but the sum of our misunderstandings.”

“Judging the mistakes of strangers is an easy thing to do - and it feels pretty good.”

“Any explanation or logic that explains everything so easily has a hidden trap in it. I'm speaking from experience. Somebody once said if it's something a single book can explain, it's not worth having explained. What I mean is don't leap to any conclusions.”

“It is the same with anything - you have to learn through your own experience, paying your own way. You can't learn it from a book.”

“In the instant Miu touched her hair, Sumire fell in love, like she was crossing a field and bang! a bolt of lightning zapped her right in the head. Something akin to an artistic revelation.”

“I think it was the right move, but if I can be allowed a mediocre generalization, don't pointless things have a place, too, in this far-from-perfect world? Remove everything pointless from an imperfect life, and it'd lose even its imperfection.”

“It is sometimes necessary for each person. Fill up with delicious food, get drunk, sing loudly and chat frivolously.”

“I don't like ringing the bell at the door. Its' tingaling just sounds beautiful. It makes one equal innocent sound, and it doesn't matter who is ringing. But knocking is distinctive. Human beats something physically - you can hear the reflected feeling. Of course, the hand always gets slightly painful.”

“People fall in love without reason, without even wanting to. You can't predict it. That's love.”

“Subject and object are not as distinct as most people think. If the boundary separating the two isn't clear-cut to begin with, it is not such a difficult task to intentionally shift back and forth from one to the other.”

“There is nothing in this world that never takes a step outside a person's heart.”

“It's not right for one friend to do all the giving and the other to do all the taking: that's not read friendship.”

“You are entering a phase of your life in which many different things will occur...bad things that seem good at first and good things that seem bad at first.”

“His heart, like mine, was ticking off the time allotted to his small restless body.”

“The years nineteen and twenty are a crucial stage in the maturation of character, and if you allow yourself to become warped when you're that age, it will cause you pain when you're older.”

“Duran Duran blared from the car stereo. The woman, two silver bracelets on the hand she dangled out the window, cast a glance in my direction. I could have been a Denny's restaurant sign or a traffic signal, it would have been no different. She was your regular sort of beautiful young woman, I guess. In a TV drama, she'd be the female lead's best friend, the face that appears once in a cafe scene to say, "What's the matter? You haven't been yourself lately.”

“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.”

“I’ve had that kind of experience myself: I’m looking at a map and I see someplace that makes me think, ‘I absolutely have to go to this place, no matter what’. And most of the time, for some reason, the place is far away and hard to get to. I feel this overwhelming desire to know what kind of scenery the place has, or what people are doing there. It’s like measles - you can’t show other people exactly where the passion comes from. It’s curiosity in the purest sense. An inexplicable inspiration.”

“And as the years have passed, the time has grown longer. The sad truth is that what I could recall in five seconds all too needed ten, then thirty, then a full minute - like shadows lengthening at dusk. Someday, I suppose, the shadows will be swallowed up in darkness.”

“piensa que el hecho de que no existan luchas, odio ni deseos significa que tampoco existen las cosas opuestas. Es decir, la alegría, la paz de espíritu, el amor. Porque es de la desesperanza, del desengaño y de la tristeza de donde nace la alegría y, sin ellas, ésta no podría existir. Es imposible encontrar una paz de espíritu sin desesperación”

“Our hearts are not stones. A stone may disintegrate in time and lose its outward form. But hearts never disintegrate. They have no outward form, and whether good or evil, we can always communicate them to one another.”

“Beautiful day out there,” I said, perching on the stool and crossing my legs. “It’s autumn, Sunday, great weather, and crowded everywhere you go. Relaxing indoors like this is the best thing you can do on such a nice day. It’s exhausting to get into those crowds. And the air is bad. I mostly do laundry on Sundays—wash the stuff in the morning, hang it out on the roof of my dorm, take it in before the sun goes down, do a good job of ironing it. I don’t mind ironing at all. There’s a special satisfaction in making wrinkled things smooth. And I’m pretty good at it, too. Of course, I was lousy at it at first. I put creases in everything. After a month of practice, though, I knew what I was doing. So Sunday is my day for laundry and ironing. I couldn’t do it today, of course. Too bad: wasted a perfect laundry day.”