Quotes by Haruki Murakami

You throw a stone into a deep pond. Splash. The sound is big, and it reverberates throughout the surrounding area. What comes out of the pond after that? All we can do is stare at the pond, holding our breath.

Samsa certainly had no idea what lay ahead. He was in the dark about everything: the future, of course, but the present and the past as well . What was right, and what was wrong? Just learning how to dress was a riddle.

Dreams are things from the past. They arent from the future. That wasnt you imprisoned there. You imprison your dreams. You understand?Yeah, Id say. But I wasnt convinced.

Everybody has to start somewhere. You have your whole future ahead of you. Perfection doesnt happen right away.

When you say you believe, you allow the possibility of disappointment. And from disappointment or betrayal, there may come despair. Such is the way of the mind.

Tell me something, Mari—do you believe in reincarnation?” Mari shakes her head. “No, I don’t think so,” she says. “So you don’t think there’s a life to come?” “I haven’t thought much about it. But it seems to me there’s no reason to believe in a life after this one.” “So once you’re dead there’s just nothing?”“Basically.”“Well, I think there has to be something like reincarnation. Or maybe I should say I’m scared to think there isn’t. I can’t understand nothingness. I can’t understand it and I can’t imagine it.” “Nothingness means there’s absolutely nothing, so maybe there’s no need to understand it or imagine it.” “Yeah, but what if nothingness is not like that? What if it’s the kind of thing that demands that you understand it or imagine it? I mean, you don’t know what it’s like to die, Mari. Maybe a person really has to die to understand what it’s like.” “Well, yeah…,” says Mari. “I get so scared when I start thinking about this stuff,” Korogi says. “I can hardly breathe, and my whole body wants to shrink into a corner. It’s so much easier to just believe in reincarnation. You might be reborn as something awful, but at least you can imagine what you’d look like—a horse, say, or a snail. And even if it was something bad, you might be luckier next time.

The very thought of such people’s intolerant worldview, their inflated sense of self superiority, and their callous imposition of their own beliefs on others was enough to fill her with rage.

It is not that the meaning cannot be explained. But there are certain meanings that are lost forever the moment they are explained in words.

But there are certain meanings that are lost forever the moment they are explained in words.

Sometimes we dont need words. Rather, its words that need us.

Words left their mouths to hang frozen in midair.

Ive been clinging to this world like a discarded shell of an insect stuck to a branch, about to be blown off forever by a gust of wind.

Thats how lonely and sad I was. Dying is not that hard. Lime the air being sucked slowly out of a room, the will to live was slowly seeping out of me. When you feel like rhat, dying doesnt seem like such a big deal.

Thats the most important thing for a sickness like ours: a sense of trust. If I put myself in this persons hands, Ill be OK. If my condition starts to worsen even the slightest bit - if a screw comes loose - hell notice straight away, and with tremendous care and patience hell fix it, hell tighten the screw again, put all the jumped threads back in place. If we have that sense of trust, our sickness stays away.

How can I put this? Theres a king of gap between what I think is real and whats really real. I get this feeling like some kind of little something-or-other is there, somewhere inside me... like a burglar is in the house, hiding in a wardrobe... and it comes out every once in a while and messes up whatever order or logic Ive established for myself. The way a magnet can make a machine go crazy.

What im trying to say is this. A certain kind of shittiness, a certain kind of stagnation, a certain kind of darkness, goes on propogating itself by its own power in its own self-contained cycle. And once it passes a certain point, no one can stop it - even if the person himself wants to stop it.

I was a vacant room. Inside, the music produces only a dry, hollow echo.

The feeling of the wind, the sound of rushing water, the sense of sunlight breaking through the clouds, the colors of flowers as the seasons changed - everything around him felt changed, as if they had all been recast.

I think most readers would say the same. Most would choose Midori. And the protagonist, of course, chooses her in the end. But some part of him is always in the other world and he cannot abandon it. It’s a part of him, an essential part. All human beings have a sickness in their minds. That space is a part of them.

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