Haruki Murakami

“Huge organizations and me don't get along. They're too inflexible, waste too much time, and have too many stupid people.”

“she was beautiful and seemingly quite intelligent, what with her pentameter search system. There wasn't a reason in the world not to find her appealing.”

“pulled into my convenient neighborhood fast food restaurant. I ordered shrimp salad, onion rings, and a beer. The shrimp were straight out of the freezer, the onion rings soggy. Looking around the place, though, I failed to spot a single customer banging on a tray or complaining to a waitress. So I shut up and finished my food. Expect nothing, get nothing.”

“You might think you made a new world or a new self, but your old self is always gonna be there, just below the surface, and if something happens, it'll stick its head out and say 'Hi.' You don't seem to realize that. You were made somewhere else.”

“Some things, you know, if you say them, it makes them not true?”

“All right, then, I thought: here I am in the bottom of a well.”

“A girl doesn't always want to go out, you know, Mr. Wind-Up Bird. Sometimes she feels like being nasty--like, if the guy's gonna wait, let him really wait.”

“Maybe she thought the garbage and rocks in your head were interesting. But finally, garbage is garbage and rocks are rocks.”

“Once a guy starts using a wig, he has to keep using one. It's, like, his fate. That's why wig makers make such huge profits. I hate to say it, but they're like drug dealers.”

“What matters is deciding in your heart to accept another person completely. When you do that, it is always the first time and the last.”

“Painful is the stress when one cannot reproduce or convey vividly to others, however hard he tries, what he's experienced so intensely.”

“She was truly a beautiful girl. I could feel a small polished stone sinking through the darkest waters of my heart. All those deep convoluted channels and passageways, and yet she managed to toss her pebble right down to the bottom of it all.”

“She's kind of funny looking. Her face is out of balance--broad forehead, buttonnose, freckled cheeks, and pointy ears. A slammed-together, rough sort of face you can't ignore. Still, the whole package isn't so bad. For all I know maybe she's not so wildabout her own looks, but she seems comfortable with who she is, and that's the important thing.”

“So what’s wrong if there happens to be one guy in the world who enjoys trying to understand you?”

“As soon as I sat down across from her, she ordered me to put the entire contents of my pants pockets on the table. I did as I was told, saying nothing. My reality seemed to have left me and was now wandering around nearby. I hope it can find me, I thought.”

“The thoughts that occur to me while I’m running are like clouds in the sky. Clouds of all different sizes. They come and they go, while the sky remains the same sky always. The clouds are mere guests in the sky that pass away and vanish, leaving behind the sky.”

“I'll never see them again. I know that. And they know that. And knowing this, we say farewell.”

“The weather service reported that there weren't any atmospheric conditions present that might have led to fish raining from the sky.”

“The sad truth is that certain types of things can't go backward. Once they start going forward, no matter what you do, they can't go back the way they were. If even one little thing goes awry, then that's how it will stay forever.”

“What the hell kind of revolution have you got just tossing out big words that working-class people can't understand?”

“Even chance meetings are the result of karma… Things in life are fated by our previous lives. That even in the smallest events there’s no such thing as coincidence.”

“Once you’re lost, you panic. You’re in total despair, not knowing what to do. I hate it when that happens. Sex can be a real pain that way, ‘cause when you get in the mood all you can think about is what’s right under your nose - that’s sex, all right.”

“Time passes slowly. Nobody says a word, everyone lost in quiet reading. One person sits at a desk jotting down notes, but the rest are sitting there silently, not moving, totally absorbed. Just like me.”

“The most important thing we learn at school is the fact that the most important things can't be learned at school.”

“I want to write about people who dream and wait for the night to end, who long for the light so they can hold the ones they love.”

“Exactly. When is comes to anything halfway important, you just don't get it. It's amazing to me that you can put a piece of fiction together''Yeah, well, that's a whole different thing.'(from Honey Pie)”

“I just gave them a little scare. A touch of psychological terror. As Joseph Conrad once wrote, true terror is the kind that men feel towards their imagination. (from Super-frog Saves Tokyo)”

“Was the earth put here just to nourish human loneliness?”

“An empty shell. Those were the first words that sprang to mind. .... Something incredibly important - .. - had disappeared from Miu for good. Leaving behind not life, but its absence”

“When I was little, I had this science book. There was a section on 'What would happen to the world if there was no friction?' Answer: 'Everything on earth would fly into space from the centrifugal force of revolution.' That was my mood.”

“In dreams begins responsiblities.”

“Time came slowly and passed slowly, so leisurely that at times he could swear it had stealthily doubled back on itself.”

“Closing your eyes isn't going to change anything. Nothing's going to disappear just because you can't see what's going on. In fact, things will even be worse the next time you open your eyes. That's the kind of world we live in. Keep your eyes wide open. Only a coward closes his eyes. Closing your eyes and plugging up your ears won't make time stand still.”

“myślę, że na pewno ciężko jest żyć samemu w miejscu, w którym ktoś nas opuścił. dobrze to rozumiem. lecz nie ma na świecie nic równie okrutnego, jak poczucie opuszczenia wywołane tym, że nie ma się na co czekać.”

“We each have a special something we can get only at a special time of our life. like a small flame. A careful, fortunate few cherish that flame, nurture it, hold it as a torch to light their way. But once that flame goes out, it’s gone forever.”

“Have your dream...What you need now more than anything is discipline. Cast off mere words. Words turn into stone. (from Thailand)”

“Don't tell me anymore. You should have your dream, as the old woman told you to. I understand how you feel, but if you put those feelings into words they will turn into lies. (from Thailand)”

“Listen to this, Nimit. Follow Coleman Hawkins' improvised lines very carefully. He is using them to tell us something. Pay very close attention. He is telling us the story of the free spirit that is doing everything it can to escape from within him. That same kind of spirit is inside me, inside you. There--you can hear it, I'm sure: the hot breath, the shivering heart. (Thailand)”

“I spent thirty-three years in another man's shadow. I went everywhere he went, I helped him with everything he did. I was in a sense a part of him. When you live like that for a long time, you gradually lose track of what it is you yourself really want out of life”

“Opera lovers may be the narrowest people in the world.”

“What was I hoping to gain from this?...Was I trying to confirm the ties that make it possible for me to exist here and now. Was I hoping to be woven into some new plot, to be given some new and better defined role to play? No, he thought, that's not it. What I was chasing in circles must have been the tail of darkness inside me. I just happened to catch sight of it, and followed it, and clung to it, and in the end let it fly into still deeper darkness. I'm sure I'll never see it again.”

“He found it increasingly difficult to accept the strict codes of the sect that clashed with ordinary values.”

“The shrill witch-hunter voices of the showbiz correspondents would bring up every last bit left in your stomach from the night before”

“Perhaps most people in the world aren’t trying to be free, Kafka. They just think they are. It’s all an illusion. If they really were set free, most people would be in a real pickle. You’d better remember that. People actually prefer not being free?”

“Unclose your mind. You are not a prisoner. You are a bird in fight, searching the skies for dreams.”

“What we needed were not words and promises but a steady accumulation of small realities.”

“Memory is like fiction; or else it's fiction that's like memory. This really came home to me once I started writing fiction, that memory seemed a kind of fiction, or vice versa. Either way, no matter how hard you try to put everything neatly into shape, the context wanders this way and that, until finally the context isn't even there anymore. You're left with this pile of kittens lolling all over one another. Warm with life, hopelessly unstable. And then to put these things out as saleable items, you call them finished products - at times it's downright embarrassing just to think of it. Honestly, it can make me blush.”

“Have you heard of the illness hysteria siberiana? Try to imagine this: You're a farmer, living all alone on the Siberian tundra. Day after day you plow your fields. As far as the eye can see, nothing. To the north, the horizon, to the east, the horizon, to the south, to the west, more of the same. Every morning, when the sun rises in the east, you go out to work in your fields. When it's directly overhead, you take a break for lunch. When it sinks in the west, you go home to sleep. And then one day, something inside you dies. Day after day you watch the sun rise in the east, pass across the sky, then sink in the west, and something breaks inside you and dies. You toss your plow aside and, your head completely empty of thought, begin walking toward the west. Heading toward a land that lies west of the sun. Like someone, possessed, you walk on, day after day, not eating or drinking, until you collapse on the ground and die. That's hysteria siberiana.”

“She's letting out her feelings. The scary thing is not being able to do that. When your feelings build up and harden and die inside, then you're in big trouble.”

“The dead will always be dead, but we have to go on living.”