Haruki Murakami

“Grasping the doorknob, Tengo turned around one last time and was shocked to see a single tear running down from his father's eye. It shone a dull silver color under the ceiling's fluorescent light. To release that tear, his father must have squeezed every bit of strength from what little emotion he still had left.”

“Constipation was one of the things she hated most in the world, on par with despicable men who commit domestic violence and narrow-minded religious fundamentalists.”

“I've always liked libraries. They're quiet and full of books and full of knowledge.”

“Human beings are ultimately nothing but carriers-passageways- for genes. They ride us into the ground like racehorses from generation to generation. Genes don't think about what constitutes good or evil. They don't care whether we are happy or unhappy. We're just means to an end for them. The only thing they think about is what is most efficient for them.”

“Memory works in different ways for everybody. Different capacities, different directions, too. Sometimes memory helps you think, sometimes it impedes. Doesn’t mean it’s good or bad. Probably means it’s no big deal.”

“This was never any place I was meant to be. This isn’t a place for me.”

“The curious thing about individuals is that their singularity always goes beyond any category or generalization in the book.”

“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.”

“I didn’t have the vaguest idea of what to do – I couldn’t keep staring at the wall forever, I told myself. But even that admonition didn’t work. A faculty advisor reviewing a graduation thesis would have had the perfect comment: you write well, you argue clearly, but you don’t have anything to say.”

“I'm always tripped up by the eternal who am I?”

“I have these realistic dreams and snap wide awake in the middle of the night. And for a while I can't work out what's real and what isn't... That kind of feeling. Do you have any idea what I'm saying?”

“As long as an individual's alive, he will undergo experience in some form or other, and those experiences are stored up instant by instant. To stop experiencin' is to die.”

“Either I'm funny or the world's funny. I don't know which. The bottle and lid don't fit. It could be the bottle's fault or the lid's fault. In either case, there's no denying that the fit is bad.”

“Like the sound of a velvet curtain being drawn aside on a peaceful morning to let sunlight wake someone very special to you.”

“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.”

“It feels like everything's been decided in advance that I'm following a path somebody else has already mapped out for me. It doesn't matter how much I think things over, how much effort I put into it. In fact, the harder I try, the more I lose my sense of who I am. It's like my identity's an orbit that I've strayed far away from, and that really hurts. But more than that, it scares me. Just thinking about it makes me flinch.”

“How much do you love me?' Midori asked.'Enough to melt all the tigers in the world to butter,' I said.”

“Even so, everything was ever so slightly off, as if little by little the tracing paper had slipped irretrievably from the lines of summers past.”

“No, I don't want your money. The world moves less by money than by what you owe people and what they owe you. I don't like to owe anybody anything, so I keep to myself as much on the lending side as I can.”

“Listening to the music while stretching her body close to its limit, she was able to attain a mysterious calm. She was simultaneously the torturer and the tortured, the forcer and the forced. This sense of inner-directed self-sufficiency was what she wanted most of all. It gave her deep solace.”

“Timpul poate curge inegal. In sine, el e constant, dar poate sa isi piarda fluditatea si sa se distorsioneze cumplit. Uneori e teribil de greoi si de lent, alteori usor si rapid. Cateodata evenimentele isi schimba cronologia sau chiar dispar cu desavarsire. Alteori apar unele care nici n-ar trebui sa existe. Manevrand astfel timpul dupa bunul lor plac, oamenii ajusteaza semnificatia pe care o atribuie propriei lor existente. Cu alte cuvinte, ei reusesc sa-si apere cumva sanatatea mintala. Daca ar fi nevoiti sa-l perceapa in mod uniform si in ordinea corecta in care acesta se scurge, mai mult ca sigur ca ar ceda nervos. O astfel de viata ar fi tortura curata.”

“Lumea nu este decat o lupta nesfarsita intre amintirile unor tabere opuse.”

“It takes years to build up, it takes moments to destroy.”

“Happiness is an allegory, unhappiness a story”

“Reality's just the accumulation of ominous prophecies come to life. All you have to do is open a newspaper on any given day to weigh the good news versus the bad news, and you'll see what I mean.”

“She gave me this look – she might have been watching from a lifeboat as the ship went down. Or maybe it was the other way around.”

“There was an inexhaustible source of clouds in some land far to the north. Decisive people, minds fixed on the task, clothed in thick, gray uniforms, working silently from morning to night to make clouds, like bees make honey, spiders make webs, and war makes widows.”

“Sometimes when I'm with you, I remember things I lost when I was your age. Like I remember the sound of the rain and the smell of the wind.”

“While you’re playing yourself out in lonesome dissipation in front of a pinball machine, someone else might be reading through Proust. Still another might be engaged in heavy petting with a girlfriend at a drive-in theater showing of Paths of Courage. The one could well become a writer, witness to the age; the others, a happily married couple. Pinball machines, however, won’t lead you anywhere.Just the replay light. Replay, replay, replay...”

“Dreaming is the day job of novelists, but sharing our dreams is a still more important task for us. We cannot be novelists without this sense of sharing something.”

“A secret's a secret because you don't let people in on it.”

“If only I could fallsound asleep and wake up in my old reality!”

“but I was not, in the true sense of the word, alive. I simply performed the mundane tasks that were handed to me, one after another”

“I never could stand being forced to do something I didn't want to do at a time I didn't want to do it. Whenever I was able to do something I liked to do, though, when I wanted to do it, and the way I wanted to do it, I'd give it everything I had.”

“I stare at this ceaseless, rushing crowd and imagine a time a hundred years from now. In a hundred years everybody here-me included-will have disappeared from the face of the earth and turned into ashes or dust. A weird thought, but everything in front of me starts to seem unreal, like a gust of wind could blow it all away.”

“The library was like a second home. Or maybe more like a real home, more than the place I lived in. By going every day I got to know all the lady librarians who worked there. They knew my name and always said hi. I was painfully shy, though, and could barely reply.”

“Probably we’d have been better off born in nineteenth-century Russia. I’d have been Prince So-and-so and you Count Such-and-such. We’d go hunting together, fight, be rivals in love, have our metaphysical complaints, drink beer watching the sunset from the shores of the Black Sea. In our later years, the two of us would be implicated in the Something-or-other Rebellion and exiled to Siberia, where we’d die. Brilliant, don’t you think? Me, if I’d been born in the nineteenth century, I’m sure I could have written better novels. Maybe not your Dostoyevsky, but a known second-rate novelist. And what would you have been doing? Maybe you’d only have been Count Such-and-such straight through. That wouldn’t be so bad, just being Count Such-and-such. That’d be nice and nineteenth century.”

“Snow floated down every once in a while, but it was frail snow, like a memory fading into the distance.”

“Mountains, according to the angle of view, the season, the time of day, the beholder's frame of mind, or any one thing, can effectively change their appearance. Thus, it is essential to recognize that we can never know more than one side, one small aspect of a mountain.”

“But Aomame could never smile easily, or casually, in front of people. When she forced it, she ended up with a tight sneer, which made others even more tense and uncomfortable. Tamaki was different: she had a natural, cheerful smile. People meeting her for the first time immediately felt friendly toward her. In the end, though, disappointment and despair drove Tamaki to take her own life, leaving Aomame – who couldn’t manage a decent smile – behind.”

“It was as if I were writing letters to hold together the pieces of my crumbling life.”

“The world [...] an endless battle of contrasting memories.”

“Overhead, the two moons worked together to bathe the world in a strange light.”

“I'll be happy if running and I can grow old together.”

“هناك نوع من الكمال لا يمكن إدراكه سوى عبر التراكم غير المحدود للنقائص.”

“Für jeden von uns gibt es etwas ganz Besonderes, das sich ihm nur in einem bestimmten Augenblick als schwache kleine Flamme darbietet. Einige achtsame, vom Glück begünstigte Menschen hegen diese Flamme, bis sie groß genug ist, um ihnen wie eine Fackel den Lebensweg zu erhellen. Erlischt diese Flamme jedoch, können wir sie nie wieder entzünden.”

“But knowing what I don’t want to do doesn’t help me figure out what I do want to do. I could do just about anything if somebody made me. But I don’t have an image of the one thing I really want to do. That’s my problem now. I can’t find the image.”

“When you introduce things that most readers have never seen before into a piece of fiction, you have to describe them with as much precision and in as much detail as possible. What you can eliminate from fiction is the description of things that most readers have seen.”

“At my core, there is nothing. Neither is it parched wastelands. At my core, there is love. I'll go on loving that ten-year-old boy named Tengo forever --- his strength, his intelligence, his kindness. He does not exist here, with me, but flesh that does not exist will never die, and promises unmade are never broken.”

“In ihrer Gegenwart vergaß ich den fundamentalen Unterton von Einsamkeit, der mein Leben bestimmte.”