Haruki Murakami

“Odsutno zagledan u mesec u zoru, sam, zapitao sam se dokle ce ovo da traje. Verovatno cu opet negde sresti neku dugu zenu. Privuci cemo se prirodno kao planete. I uzalud ocekujuci cudo, glodacemo dane, istrosicemo duse i rastacemo se.”

“Ali nista se ne zavrsava tako lako. Kada covek trazi nesto od zivota (a ima li koga ko ne trazi nista?), zivot od njega zahteva mnogo vise informacija. Da bi se nacrtao precizan dijagram, neophodno je mnogo vise tacaka. U suprotnom, nema ni odgovora.”

“Así pensaba cuando tenía tu edad, y sigo pensando lo mismo. Tal vez porque no he madurado, o tal vez porque siempre he tenido razón.”

“Every single day, each time I see her face, see her, it's utterly precious.”

“I never plan. I never know what the next page is going to be..... But that’s the fun of writing a novel or a story, because I don’t know what’s going to happen next.”

“If people aren’t equal, where would you fit in?”

“Somebody once said if it’s something a single book can explain,it’s not worth having explained. What I mean is don’t leap toany conclusions.”

“Busco la perfección. Por eso es tan difícil. –¿Un amor perfecto? –¡No! No pido tanto. Lo que quiero es simple egoísmo. Un egoísmo perfecto. Por ejemplo: te digo que quiero un pastel de fresa, y entonces tú lo dejas todo y vas a comprármelo.Vuelves jadeando y me lo ofreces. «Toma, Midori. Tu pastel de fresa», me dices. Y te suelto:«¡Ya se me han quitado las ganas de comérmelo!». Y lo arrojo por la ventana. Eso es lo que yo quiero.–No creo que eso sea el amor -le dije con semblante atónito.–Sí tiene que ver. Pero tú no lo sabes -replicó Midori-. Para las chicas, a veces esto tiene una gran importancia. –¿Arrojar pasteles de fresa por la ventana?–Sí. Y yo quiero que mi novio me diga lo siguiente: «Ha sido culpa mía. Tendría que haber supuesto que se te quitarían las ganas de comer pastel de fresa. Soy un estúpido, un insensible. Iré a comprarte otra cosa para que me perdones. ¿Qué te apetece? ¿Mousse de chocolate? ¿Tarta de queso?». –¿Y qué sucedería a continuación?–Pues que yo a una persona que hiciera esto por mí la querría mucho.”

“He did not have the sort of looks suited for stakeouts or tailing people. As much as he might try to lose himself in a crowd, he was as inconspicuous as a centipede in a coup of yogurt.”

“I placed the highest priority on the sort of life that lets me focus on writing, not associating with all the people around me.”

“We have a sane part of our minds and an insane part. We negotiate between those two parts.”

“That is dreamreading. As the birds leave south or north in their season, the Dreamreader has dreams to read.”

“Things cultivated over such a long time don't just vanish into nothingness.”

“When a vacuum forms, someting has to come along to fill it. Because that's what everybody does.”

“If the boat they were riding in was plunging over the falls upside down, there was nothing to do but fall with it. Tebngo could struggle all he wanted to at this point, and it would do nothing to change the flow of the river.”

“It's the real world, full of gaps and inconsistencies and anticlimaxes.”

“Les souvenirs, c'est quelque chose qui vous réchauffe de l'intérieur. Et qui vous déchire violemment le cœur en même temps.”

“Des occasions précieuses, des possibilités, des sentiments qu’on ne pourra pas retrouver. C’est cela aussi, vivre. Mais à l’intérieur de notre esprit – je crois que c’est à l’intérieur de notre esprit, il y a une petite pièce dans laquelle nous stockons le souvenir de toutes ces occasions perdues. Une pièce avec des rayonnages, comme dans cette bibliothèque, j’imagine. Et il faut que nous fabriquions un index, avec des cartes de références, pour connaître précisément ce qu’il y a dans nos cœurs. Il faut aussi balayer cette pièce, l’aérer, changer l’eau des fleurs. En d’autres termes, tu devras vivre dans ta propre bibliothèque.”

“Even though I might go out on a date with a boy, emotionally I just wouldn’t be able to concentrate. I’d be smiling and chatting away, and my mind would be floating around somewhere else, like a balloon with a broken string. I’d be thinking about one unrelated thing after another. I don’t know, I guess finally I want to be alone a little while longer. And I want to let my thoughts wander freely.”

“I could disappear from the face of the earth, and the world would go on moving without the slightest twinge. Things were tremendously complicated, to be sure, but one thing was clear: no one needed me.”

“I’m not very good at giving people orderly explanations of things.”

“Nemoj da se sažaljevaš. To rade samo kreteni.”

“Now I don't know if you realize it, but the film industry's a small world. It's like living in a tenement at one end of a back alley. Not only do you see everybody's dirty laundry, but once rumors start, you can't stop 'em.”

“I’m just kinda tired. Like a monkey in the rain.”

“Even when I ran my bar I followed the same policy. A lot of customers came to the bar. If one in ten enjoyed the place and said he'd come again, that was enough. If one out of ten was a repeat customer, then the business would survive. To put it another way, it didn't matter if nine out of ten didn't like my bar. This realization lifted a weight off my shoulders. Still, I had to make sure that the one person who did like the place really liked it. In order to make sure he did, I had to make my philosophy and stance clear-cut, and patiently maintain that stance no matter what. This is what I learned through running a business.”

“I began guitar after coming here as there wasn't a piano about. I taught myself, but my fingers just aren't cut out for the guitar, so I can't seem to get very good. Still, I like the innstrument. It's light, simple, straighforward, like a warm little room, nice and cozy.”

“It's kind of embarrassing to put this into words," she said, "but I want to stay friends with you, Junpei. Not just for now, but even after we get older. A lot older. I love Takatsuki, but I need you, too, in a different way. Does that make me selfish?”

“May I give you a piece of advise? ... Don't feel sorry for yourself, only arseholes do that.”

“This is what it means to live on. When granted hope, a person uses it as fuel, as a guidepost to life. It is impossible to live without hope.”

“The most dangerous creature here would have to be me. So maybe I'm just scared of my own shadow.”

“Si no lo entiendes sin que te lo explique, quiere decir que no lo entenderás por más que te lo explique”

“Hay personas que pueden herir a los demás por el mero hecho de existir.”

“The world is full of ways and means to waste time.”

“I'm not afraid to die. What I'm afraid of is having reality get the better of me, of having reality leave me behind.”

“Once you let yourself grow close to someone, cutting the ties could be painful.”

“They were people who had no doubt whatsoever that the more narrow-minded they became, the closer they got to heaven.”

“Whatever the composition of this new world might be, I surely have no choice but to accept it in silence.”

“But the silence spoke volumes.”

“¿Quién leería sobre la sosegada y poco agitada vida y muerte de un empleado de la Biblioteca Municipal de Kawasaki? En definitiva: lo que buscamos es una compensación de lo que no tenemos.”

“Life's no piece of cake, mind you, but the recipe's my own to fool with.”

“In dreams lie responsibilities.”

“Nobody's easier to fool, than the person who is convinced that he is right.”

“The people who build high, strong fences are the ones who survive the best. You deny that reality only at the risk of being driven into the wilderness yourself...”

“If people lived forever—if they never got any older—if they could just go on living in this world, never dying, always healthy—do you think they’d bother to think hard about things, the way were doing now? I mean, we think about its everything, more or less—philosophy, psychology, logic. Religion. Literature. I kinda think, if there were no such thing as death, the complicated thoughts and ideas like that would never come into the world.”

“It must be hard to pass your twentieth birthday alone.”

“But how do you see you?" she asked."Ever read The Brothers Karamazov?" I asked."Once, a long time ago.""Well, toward the end, Alyosha is speaking to a young student named Kolya Krasotkin. And he says, Kolya, you're going to have a miserable future. But overall, you'll have a happy life."Two beers down, I hesitated before opening my third."When I first read that, I didn't know what Alyosha meant," I said. "How was it possible for a life of misery to be happy overall? But then I understood, that misery could be limited to the future.""I have no idea what you're talking about.""Neither do I," I said. "Not yet.”

“I gazed up at the sky. I was in a tiny boat, on a vast ocean. No wind, no waves, just me floating there. Adrift on the open sea....A tiny boat cut loose from the fiction of the ship.”

“With the advent of winter, her eyes seemed to take on a greater transparency, a transparency that lead nowhere. Occassionally, for no particular reason, Naoko would gaze into my eyes as if searching for something. Each time I was filled with odd sensations of lonliness and inadequecy.”

“Start making excuses and there's no end to it. I can't live that kind of life.”

“Another person's life is that person's life. You can't take responsibility.”