Haruki Murakami

“It made her think of Laika, the dog. The man-made satellite streaking soundlessly across the blackness of outer space. The dark, lustrous eyes of the dog gazing out of the tiny window. In the infinite loneliness of space, what could Laika possibly be looking at?”

“How you think and feel's always linked to the lie of the land, the temperature. The prevailing winds, even." p.498”

“Between the time the last train leaves and the first train arrives, the place changes: it's not the same as in daytime.”

“The power to concentrate was the most important thing. Living without this power would be like opening one’s eyes without seeing anything.”

“A deserted library in the morning - there's something about it that really gets to me. All possible words and ideas are there, resting peacefully.”

“Sheepish butlers' surgical bottle battles" a tongue twister p.364”

“The heavy smell of flower petals stroked the walls of my lungs.”

“I wonder how it turns out that we all lead such different lives. Take you and your sister, for example. You're born to the same parents, you grow up in the same household, you're both girls. How do you end up with such wildly different personalities?...One puts on a bikini like little semaphore flags and lies by the pool looking sexy, and the other puts on her school bathing suit and swims her heart out like a dolphin...”

“That's good. I was worried. Of course, I do have a few things wrong with me, but those are strictly problems I keep inside. I'd hate to think they were obvious to anybody else. Especially at the swimming pool in the summer.”

“pensei na chuva que caía sobre o mar. Chovia em segredo no vasto oceano, sem que ninguém soubesse disso.”

“let the wind change direction a little bit, and their cries turned to whispers.”

“My only passions were books and music. As you might guess, I led a lonely life… Not that I knew what I wanted in life - I didn’t. I loved reading novels to distraction, but didn’t write well enough to be a novelist; being an editor or a critic was out, too, since my tastes ran to the extremes. Novels should be for pure personal enjoyment, I decided, not part of your work or study. That’s why I didn’t study literature”

“Memories and thoughts age, just as people do. But certain thoughts can never age, and certain memories can never fade.”

“I never once thought I wanted to be a soldier. I wanted to be a teacher. As soon as I left college, though, they sent me my draft notice, stuck me in officers training, and I ended up on the continent for twelve years. My life went by like a dream.”

“Your work should be an act of love, not a marriage of convenience.”

“Exhaustion pays no mind to age or beauty. Like rain and earthquakes and hail and floods.”

“I think that my job is to observe people and the world, and not to judge them. I always hope to position myself away from so-called conclusions. I would like to leave everything wide open to all the possibilities in the world.”

“I’ve built a wall around me, never letting anybody inside and trying not to venture outside myself”

“The little things are important, Mr. Wind-Up Bird,”

“Living like an empty shell is not really living, no matter how many years it may go on. The heart and flesh of an empty shell give birth to nothing more than the life of an empty shell.”

“I would stare at the grains of light suspended in that silent space, struggling to see into my own heart. What did I want? And what did others want from me? But I could never find the answers. Sometimes I would reach out and try to grasp the grains of light, but my fingers touched nothing.”

“I’m not good at talking,” Naoko said. “Haven’t been for the longest while. I start to say something and the wrong words come out. Wrong or sometimes completely backward. I try to go back and correct it, but things get even more complicated and confused, so that I don’t even remember what I started to say in the first place. Like I was split into two or something, one half chasing the other. And there’s this big pillar in the middle and they go chasing each other around and around it. The other me always latches onto the right word and this me absolutely never catches up”

“sound is of no use to human evolution. in fact, it gets in the way.”

“We fell silent again. The thing we had shared was nothing more than a fragment of time that had died longe ago.Even so, a faint glimmer of that warm memory still claimed a part of my heart. And when death claim me, no doubt I would walk along by that faint light in the brief instant before being flung once again into the abyss of nothingness”

“That's when I gave up pinball. When the times comes, everybody gives up pinball. Nothing more to it.”

“The problem was, I think, that the places I fit in were always falling behind the rimes.”

“I could go on like this forever, but would I ever find a place that was meant for me? Like, for example, where? After lengthy considerations, the only place I could think of was the cockpit of a two-seater Kamikaze torpedo-plane. Of all the dumb ideas. In the first place, all the torpedo-planes were scrapped thirty years ago”

“Once, when I was younger, I thought I could be someone else. I'd move to Casablanca, open a bar, and I'd meet Ingrid Bergman. Or more realistically - whether actually more realistic or not - I'd tune in on a better life, something more suited to my true self. Toward that end, I had to undergo training. I read The Greening of America, and I saw Easy Rider three times. But like a boat with a twisted rudder, I kept coming back to the same place. I wasn't anywhere. I was myself, waiting on the shore for me to return.”

“The best musicians transpose consciousness into sound; painters do the same for color and shape.”

“E cominciai ad accorgermi che essere soli è una cosa molto triste.Essere soli è come, in una sera quando diluvia, stare fermi alla foce di un grande fiume e guardare un‟enorme massa d‟acqua gettarsi nel mare. Sei mai stato fermo alla foce di un grande fiume a guardare l‟acqua che si getta nel mare?”

“Ito ang inabot ng kanyang karunungan patungkol sa dagat: ito ay malaki, maalat at doon nakatira ang mga isda.”

“The world is a huge space, but the space that will take you in - and it doesn't have to be very big - is nowhere to be found. You seek a voice, but what do you get? Silence. You look for silence, but guess what? All you hear over and over and over is the voice of this omen. And sometimes this prophetic voice pushes a secret switch hidden deep inside your brain.Your heart is like a great river after a long spell of rain, spilling over its banks. All signposts that once stood on the ground are gone, inundated and carried away by that rush of water. And still the rain beats down on the surface of the river. Every time you see a flood like that on the news you tell yourself: That's it. That's my heart.”

“And when it was all over, the king and his retainers burst out laughing.”

“sometimes i'd wake up at two or three in the morning and not be able to fall asleep again. i'd get out of bed, go to the kitchen, and pour myself a whiskey. glass in hand, i'd look down at the darkened cemetary across teh way and the headlights of the cars on the road. the moments of time linking night and dawn were long and dark. if i could cry, it might make things easier. but what would i cry over? i was too self centered to cry for other people, too old to cry for myself.”

“How many Sundays – how many hundreds of Sundays like this – lay ahead of me? “Quiet, peaceful and lonely,” I said aloud to myself. On Sundays i didn't wind my spring.”

“It just happens to be the way that I'm made. I have to write things down to feel I fully comprehend them.”

“Imagine The Greatest Hits of Bobby Darin minus 'Mack the Knife.' That's what my life would be like without you.”

“Her voice was like a line from an old black-and-white Jean-Luc Godard movie, filtering in just beyond the frame of my consciousness.”

“Reiko set the ball on the ground and patted my knee. "Look," she said, "I'm not telling you to stop sleeping with girls. If you're O.K. with that, then it's OK. It's your life after all, it's something you have to decide. All I'm saying is that you shouldn't use yourself up in some unnatural form. Do you see what I'm getting at? It would be such a waste. 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. It's true. So think carefully. If you want to take care of Naoko, take care of yourself too." I said I would think about it.”

“Prvo, o duši. Kažeš mi da u gradu nema sukoba, mržnje, niti žudnje. To je lijep san, i ja ti želim sreću. Ali odsustvo sukoba, mržnje ili žudnje znači i to da ne postoje ni njihove suprotnosti. Nema radosti, nema zajedništva, nema ljubavi. Samo tamo gdje postoje razočarenje, potištenost i tuga javlja se i sreća; bez očaja zbog gubitka nema ni nade.”

“Pero, si se me permite formular una anodina teoria general, en nuestra vida imperfecta las cosas inutiles son, en cierta medida, necesarias.”

“Beyond the edge of the world there’s a space where emptiness and substance neatly overlap, where past and future form a continuous, endless loop. And, hovering about, there are signs no one has ever read, chords no one has ever heard.”

“I said nothing for a time, just ran my fingertips along the edge of the human-shaped emptiness that had been left inside me.”

“If writing novels is like planting a forest, then writing short stories is more like planting a garden. The two processes complement each other, creating a complete landscape that I treasure. The green foliage of the trees casts a pleasant shade over the earth, and the wind rustles the leaves, which are sometimes dyed a brilliant gold. Meanwhile, in the garden, buds appear on the flowers, and colorful petals attract bees and butterflies, reminding us of the subtle transition from one season to the next.”

“Even after the ringing stopped, the sound of the bell lingered through the evening gloom like the dust floating in the air.”

“In my case, if I start out by thinking about the plot, things don't go well. Small points, such as my impression of what is likely to occur, do come to mind, but I let the rest of the story take its own course. I don't want to spend as long as two years writing a story whose plot I already know.”

“Sometimes we don't need words. Rather, it's words that need us. If we were no longer here, words would lose their whole function. They would end up as words that are never spoken, and words that aren't spoken are no longer words.”

“I clicked the gate shut and slipped down the alley. Through one fence after another, I caught glimpses of people in their dining rooms and living rooms, eating and watching TV dramas. Food smells drifted into the alley through kitchen windows and exhaust fans. One teenaged boy was practicing a fast passage on his electric guitar, with the volume turned down. In a second floor window, a tiny girl was studying at her desk, an earnest expression on her face. A married couple in a heated argument sent their voices out to the alley. A baby was screaming. A telephone rang. Reality spilled out into the alley like water from an overfilled bowl - as sound, as smell, as image, as plea, as response.”

“I never trust people with no appetite. It's like they're always holding something back on you.”

“Open your eyes, train your ears, use your head. If a mind you have, then use it while you can.”