Haruki Murakami

“Wir waren, sie ebenso wie ich, noch fragmentarische Geschöpfe, die gerade erst begannen, die Existenz einer unerwarteten Wirklichkeit zu erahnen, die wir uns noch würden aneignen müssen, die uns ausfüllen und vervollständigen würde. Wir standen vor einer Tür, die wir noch nie zuvor gesehen hatten. Wir beide allein, unter einem schwach flackernden Licht, unsere Hände fest umeinander geschlossen, für flüchtige zehn Sekunden.”

“Die Leute schauen vorbei, nehmen ein paar Drinks, hören sich die Musik an, unterhalten sich und gehen dann nach Hause. Sie sind bereit, für ein paar Drinks bis hier hinauszufahren und dann noch eine Menge Geld auszugeben – und weißt du, warum? Weil jeder das gleiche sucht: einen imaginären Ort, sein eigenes Luftschloss, und darin seinen ganz besonderen privaten Winkel.”

“The point is, not to resist the flow. You go up when you're supposed to go up and down when you're supposed to go down. When you're supposed to go up, find the highest tower and climb to the top. When you're supposed to go down, find the deepest well and go down to the bottom. When there's no flow, stay still. If you resist the flow, everything dries up. If everything dries up, the world is darkness.”

“Somewhere along the line Coltrane's soprano sax runs out of steam. Now it's McCoy Tyner's piano solo I hear, the left hand carving out a repetitious rhythm and the right layering on thick, forbidding chords. Like some mythic scene, the music portrays somebody's - a nameless, faceless somebody's - dim past, all the details laid out as clearly as entrails being dragged out of the darkness. Or at least that's how it sounds to me. The patient, repeating music ever so slowly breaks apart the real, rearranging the pieces. It has a hypnotic, menacing smell, just like the forest.”

“Even so, there were times I saw freshness and beauty. I could smell the air, and I really loved rock 'n' roll. Tears were warm, and girls were beautiful, like dreams. I liked movie theaters, the darkness and intimacy, and I liked the deep, sad summer nights.”

“The real world is in a much darker and deeper place than this, and most of it is occupied by jellyfish and things. We just happen to to forget all that. Don't you agree? Two-thirds of earth's surface is ocean, and all we can see with the naked eye is the surface: the skin.”

“Forgive me for stating the obvious, but the world is made up of all kinds of people.”

“I do feel that I’ve managed to make something I could maybe call my world…over time…little by little. And when I’m inside it, to some extent, I feel kind of relieved. But the very fact I felt I had to make such a world probably means that I’m a weak person, that I bruise easily, don’t you think? And in the eyes of society at large, that world of mine is a puny little thing. It’s like a cardboard house: a puff of wind might carry it off somewhere.”

“I don't know, there's something about you. Say there's an hourglass: the sand's about to run out. Someone like you can always be counted on to turn the thing over.”

“I was twenty-one at the time, about to turn twenty-two. No prospect of graduating soon, and yet no reason to quit school. Caught in the most curiously depressing circumstances. For months I'd been stuck, unable to take one step in any new direction. The world kept moving on; I alone was at a standstill. In the autumn, everything took on a desolate cast, the colors swiftly fading before my eyes. The sunlight, the smell of the grass, the faintest patter of rain, everything got on my nerves.”

“As with marathon runs and lengths of toilet paper, there had to be standards to measure up to.”

“Hey Kizuki, I thought, you're not missing a damn thing. This world is a piece of shit. The assholes are earning their college credits and helping to create a society in their own disgusting image.”

“Quiero llegar hasta donde pueda empleando todas mis fuerzas. Tomando lo que quiero, dejando lo que no quiero. Así es como vivo. Si meto la pata, me detengo y lo reconsidero. Si uno le da la vuelta a esta sociedad injusta, entiende que en el mundo puede explotar sus posibilidades. -Nagasawa”

“Cagajones por todas partes. Una mierda si estás aquí, una mierda si vas allá. El mundo entero es una mierda”

“It's like a kid standing at the window watching the rain.”

“As far as I could see, she had no opinion at all about anything that was not set directly in front of her (and in fact, she was extremely nearsighted).”

“That’s why I like to listen to Schubert while I’m driving. Like I said, it’s because all the performances are imperfect. A dense, artistic kind of imperfection stimulates your consciousness, keeps you alert. If I listen to some utterly perfect performance of an utterly perfect piece while I’m driving, I might want to close my eyes and die right then and there. But listening to the D major, I can feel the limits of what humans are capable of—that a certain type of perfection can only be realized through a limitless accumulation of the imperfect. And personally, I find that encouraging.”

“I miss you terribly sometimes, but in general I go on living with all the energy I can muster. Just as you take care of the birds and the fields every morning, every morning I wind my own spring. I give it some 36 good twists by the time I've got up, brushed my teeth, shaved, eaten breakfast, changed my clothes, left the dorm, and arrived at the university. I tell myself, "OK, let's make this day another good one." I hadn't noticed before, but they tell me I talk to myself a lot these days. Probably mumbling to myself while I wind my spring.”

“Count your blessings”

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

“mediocrity is a constant, as one Russian writer put it. Russians have a way with aphorisms. They probably spend all winter thinking them up.”

“One of these days they'll be making a film where the whole human race gets wiped out in a nuclear war, but everything works out in the end. ”

“Generally, people who are good at writing letters have no need to write letters. They've got plenty of life to lead inside their own context.”

“That’s all I think about these days. Must be because I have so much time to kill every day. When you don’t have anything to do, your thoughts get really, really far out-so far outyou can’t follow them all the way to the end.”

“One last word of advice, though, Mr. Okada, though you may not want to hear this. There are things in this world it is better not to know about. Of course, those are the very things that people most want to know about. It's strange.”

“Results aside, the ability to have complete faith in another human being is one of the finest qualities a person can possess.”

“Pills and fortune-telling and dieting: nobody can stop her when it comes to any of those things.”

“The world in books seemed so much more alive to me than anything outside. I could see things I'd never seen before. Books and music were my best friends. I had a couple of good friends at school, but never met anyone I could really speak my heart to.”

“Which is why I am writing this book. To think. To understand. It just happens to be the way I'm made. I have to write things down to feel I fully comprehend them.”

“If you try to use your head to think about things, people don't want to have anything to do with you”

“Each person feels pain in his own way, each has his own scars.”

“Nature is actually unnatural”

“Distance might not solve anything, no matter how far you run.”

“I don't think most people would like my personality. There might be a few--very few, I would imagine--who are impressed by it, but only rarely would anyone like it. Who in the world could possibly have warm feelings, or something like them, for a person who doesn't compromise, who instead, whenever a problem crops up, locks himself away alone in a closet? But is it ever possible for a professional writer to be liked by people? I have no idea. Maybe somewhere in the world it is. It's hard to generalize. For me, at least, I've written novels over many years, I just can't picture someone liking me on a personal level. Being disliked by someone, hated and despised, somehow seems more natural. Not that I'm relieved when that happens. Even I'm not happy when someone dislikes me.”

“No matter what form the relationship might take, he was the only person she could picture sharing her life with.”

“Understanding is but the sum of misunderstandings.”

“The ground we stand on looks solid enough, but if something happens it can drop right out from under you.”

“Memory is so crazy! It's like we've got these drawers crammed with tons of useless stuff. Meanwhile, all the really important things we just keep forgetting, one after the other.”

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

“It's my motto for life. 'Walk slowly; drink lots of water.”

“This layers, like some kind of transparent sponge kind of thing, stands there between Eri Asai and me, and the words that come out of my mouth have to pass through it, and when that happens, the sponge sucks almost all the nutrients right out of them.”

“But what seems like a reasonable distance to one person might feel too far to somebody else.”

“It was the usual noontime university scene, but as I sat watching it with renewed attention, I became aware of a certain fact. In his or her own way, each person I saw before me looked happy. Whether they really were happy or just looked it, I couldn't tell. But they did look happy on this pleasant early afternoon at the end of September, and because of that I felt a kind of loneliness that was new to me, as if I were the only one here who was not truly part of the scene.”

“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.”

“So the fact that I’m me and no one else is one of my greatest assets. Emotional hurt is the price a person has to pay in order to be independent.”

“For me, running is both exercise and a metaphor. Running day after day, piling up the races, bit by bit I raise the bar, and by clearing each level I elevate myself. At least that’s why I’ve put in the effort day after day: to raise my own level. I’m no great runner, by any means. I’m at an ordinary – or perhaps more like mediocre – level. But that’s not the point. The point is whether or not I improved over yesterday. In long-distance running the only opponent you have to beat is yourself, the way you used to be.”

“A friend to kill time is a friend sublime.”

“Waves of thought are stirring. In a twilight corner of her consciousness, one tiny fragment and another tiny fragment call out wordlessly to eachother, their spreading ripples intermingling.”

“And her sleep was too long and deep for that:so deep that she left her normal reality behind.”

“Is action merely the incidental product of thought, or is thought the consequential product of action?”