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.”

“He was up to his neck in it. He was breathing the air of its world, adapting to its gravity. The story's essence had permeated every part of him, to the walls of his viscera.”

“La muerte no existe en contraposición a la vida sino como parte de ella.”

“I didn't feel like I was in my own body; my body was just a lonely, temporary container I happened to be borrowing.”

“No one could say how long that life would last. Whatever has form can disappear in an instant.”

“What a terrible thing it is to wound someone you really care for and to do it so unconsciously.”

“Our faces were no more than ten inches apart but she was lightyears away from me.”

“Her cry was the saddest sound of orgasm that I had ever heard.”

“A Russian who uses his imagination is done for. I certainly never use mine.”

“Once she was out of the car and gone, my world was suddenly hollow and meaningless.”

“El mundo es una lucha eterna entre una memoria y otra memoria opuesta.”

“A certain something, he felt, had managed to work its way in through a tiny opening and was trying to fill a blank space inside him. The void was not one that she had made. It had always been there inside him. She had merely managed to shine a special light on it.”

“En mi vida hay espacio para el aburrimiento, pero no lo hay para el hastío. La mayoría de la gente no sabe discernir entre ambas cosas.”

“If you never noticed, it never happened.”

“This uneasiness comes over me from time to time, and I feel as if I've somehow been pieced together from two different puzzles.”

“I go by the gut. I might not appear to have any talent but I've got plenty of gut instinct.”

“You must not let fatigue set in," she warns. "That is what my mother said. Let your body work until it is spent, but keep your mind for yourself.""Good advice.""To tell the truth, I do not know this thing called 'mind', what it does or how to use it. It is only a word I have heard.""The mind is nothing you use," I say. "The mind is just there. It is like the wind. You simply feel its movements.”

“What we call the present is given shape by an accumulation of the past.”

“Well, look at it another way: why shouldn’t there be cats in a zoo?" I said."They’re animals, too, right?""Cats and dogs are your run-of-the-mill-type animals. Nobody’s going to pay money to see them," he said. "Just look around you-they’re everywhere. Same thing with people.”

“Los conocimientos importantes conllevan importantes responsabilidades.”

“I feel very strongly that all Japanese at that time had the idea drilled into them of 1999 being the end of the world. Aum renunciates have already accepted, inside themselves, the end of the world, because when they become a renunciate, they discard themselves totally, thereby abandoning the world. In other words, Aum is a collection of people who have accepted the end. People who continue to hold out hope for the near future still have an attachment to the world. If you have attachments, you will not discard your Self, but for Renunciates it's as if they've leaped right off the cliff. And taking a giant leap like that feels good. They lose something - but gain something in return.”

“In the end, like so many beautiful promises in our lives, that dinner date never came to be.”

“No creas que estoy enfadada contigo. Sólo estoy triste. Por que tú has sido muy amable conmigo, y, a cambio, no he sabido ayudarte. Tú siempre estás encerrado en tu propio mundo y, cuando llamo a la puerta, ¨toc, toc¨, te limitas a levantar la cabeza antes de volver a encerrarte.”

“Nos dimos la mano y nos separamos. Él se dirigió hacia su nuevo mundo y yo volví a mi lodazal.”

“Pero te advierto que Watanabe es igual que yo. Amable y cariñoso, pero incapaz de amar a nadie con el corazón en la mano. Hay una parte de él que siempre está alerta, siente un ansia que lo devora. Lo sé de sobra.”

“Lo que nos hace personas normales es saber que no somos normales.”

“Mental acuity was never born from comfortable circumstances.”

“Things may look different to you than they did before. I've had that experience myself. But don't let appearances fool you. There's only one reality.”

“This may be the most important proposition revealed by history: 'At the time, no one knew what was coming.”

“La verdad es que en lo relativo al corazón, soy una gallina, Lo mío es grave.”

“Yo no puedo permitirme hacerme cargo de la vida de los otros. Ya tengo de sobra con soportar el peso de mi propia vida y mi soledad.”

“Todo es incierto y completamente ambiguo”

“Our memory is made up of our individual memories and our collective memories. The two are intimately linked. And history is our collective memory. If our collective memory is taken from us - is rewritten - we lose the ability to sustain our true selves.”

“Have you ever had that feeling—that you’d like to go to a whole different place and become a whole different self?”

“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.”

“Everybody burns out in this world; amateur, pro, it doesn't matter, they all burn out, they all get hurt, the OK guys and the not-OK guys both. That's why everybody takes out a little insurance. I've got some too, here at the bottom of the heap. That way, you manage to survive if you burn out. If you're all by yourself and don't belong anywhere, you go down once, and you're out. Finished.”

“She lived frugally, but her meals were the only things on which she deliberately spent her money. She never compromised on the quality of her groceries, and drank only good-quality wines.”

“Math is like water. It has a lot of difficult theories, of course, but its basic logic is very simple. Just as water flows from high to low over the shortest possible distance, figures can only flow in one direction. You just have to keep your eye on them for the route to reveal itself. That’s all it takes. You don’t have to do a thing. Just concentrate your attention and keep your eyes open, and the figures make everything clear to you. In this whole, wide world, the only thing that treats me so kindly is math.”

“It's the same with menus and men and just about anything else: we think we're choosing things for ourselves, but in fact we may not be choosing anything. It could be that everthing's being decided in advance and we pretend we're making choices. Free will may be an illusion. I often think that.”

“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.”

“In the name of God, they stole her time and her freedom, putting shackles on her heart. They preached about God's kindness, but preached twice as much about his wrath and intolerance.”

“Being alive, if you had to define it, meant emitting a variety of smells”

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

“A person learns how to love himself through the simple acts of loving and being loved by someone else.”

“Things like this don't happen all that often in one lifetime. This is the magnificent world of a picaresque novel. Just brace yourself and enjoy the smell of evil. We're shooting the rapids. And when we go over the falls, let's do it together in grand style!”

“Even if you managed to escape from one cage, weren't you just in another, larger one?”

“What was lost was lost. There was no retrieving it, however you schemed, no returning to how things were, no going back.”

“For some reason all the middle-aged women he knew were very efficient.”

“I made up my mind I was going to find someone who would love me unconditionally three hundred and sixty five days a year, I was still in elementary school at the time - fifth or sixth grade - but I made up my mind once and for all.”“Wow,” I said. “Did the search pay off?”“That’s the hard part,” said Midori. She watched the rising smoke for a while, thinking. “I guess I’ve been waiting so long I’m looking for perfection. That makes it tough.”“Waiting for the perfect love?”“No, even I know better than that. I’m looking for selfishness. Perfect selfishness. Like, say I tell you I want to eat strawberry shortcake. And you stop everything you’re doing and run out and buy it for me. And you come back out of breath and get down on your knees and hold this strawberry shortcake out to me. And I say I don’t want it anymore and throw it out the window. That’s what I’m looking for.”“I’m not sure that has anything to do with love,” I said with some amazement.“It does,” she said. “You just don’t know it. There are time in a girl’s life when things like that are incredibly important.”“Things like throwing strawberry shortcake out the window?”“Exactly. And when I do it, I want the man to apologize to me. “Now I see, Midori. What a fool I have been! I should have known that you would lose your desire for strawberry shortcake. I have all the intelligence and sensitivity of a piece of donkey shit. To make it up to you, I’ll go out and buy you something else. What would you like? Chocolate Mousse? Cheesecake?”“So then what?”“So then I’d give him all the love he deserves for what he’s done.”“Sounds crazy to me.”“Well, to me, that’s what love is…”

“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.”