Quotes by Haruki Murakami

And you came to Finland to build a station?No I came here on vacation to visit a friend.Thats good, the driver said. Vacations and friends are the two best things in life.

For a ten-year-old boy and a ten-year-old girl to become good friends was not easy under any circumstances. Indeed, it might be one of the most difficult accomplishments in the world.

Unsure how to answer, I took another grape. Time was no problem for me, but I wasnt eager to hear the long life story of a dwarf. And besides, this was a dream. It could evaporate any moment.

This life is nothing but a short, painful dream.

That’s my dream. It’s always the same. Always. Every little detail. And every time I have it, it’s just as scary as the last.(…)It’s so real, I feel as if I’ve already died hundreds of times.

She tried to think about what lay ahead, but soon gave up. Words turn into stone, Nimit had told her. She settled deep into her seat and closed her eyes. All at once the image came to her of the sky she had seen while swimming on her back. And Erroll Garners Ill Remember April. Let me sleep, she thought. Just let me sleep. And wait for the dream to come.

I dont dream. Come to think of it, i havent had any dreams in a long time.

Writing a novel is like having a dream.

The third dream was hard to put into words. It was a rambling, incoherent dream without any setting. All that was there was a feeling of being in motion. Aomame was ceaselessly moving through time and space It didnt matter when or where this was All that mattered was this movement. Everything was fluid, and a specific meaning was born of that fluidity. But as she gave herself up to it, she found her body growing transparent. She could see through her hands to the other side. Her bones, organs, and womb became visible. At this rate she might very well no longer exist. After she could no longer see herself, Aomame wondered what could possibly come then. She had no answer.

Well, finally, once you become an orphan, youre an orphan till the day you die. I keep having the same dream. Im seven years old and an orphan again. All alone, with no adults around to take care of me. Its evening, and the light is fading, and night is pressing in. Its always the same. In the dream I always go back to being seven years old. Software like that you cant exchange once its contaminated.

Precipitate as weather, she appeared from somewhere, then evaporated, leaving only memory.

I think memory is the most important asset of human beings. It’s a kind of fuel; it burns and it warms you. My memory is like a chest: There are so many drawers in that chest, and when I want to be a fifteen-year-old boy, I open up a certain drawer and I find the scenery I saw when I was a boy in Kobe. I can smell the air, and I can touch the ground, and I can see the green of the trees. That’s why I want to write a book.

Memory works in different ways for everybody. Different capacities, different directions, too. Sometimes memory helps you think, sometimes it impedes. Doesn’t mean it’s good or bad. Probably means it’s no big deal.

You can hide memories, but you cant erase the history that produced them.Sara looked directly into his eyesI nothing else, you need to remember that. you cant erase history, or change it. it would be like destroying yourself.

Robbing people of their actual history is the same as robbing them of part of themselves. It’s a crime.Fuka-Eri thought about that for a moment.Tengo went on, “Our memory is made up of our individual memories and our collective memories. The two are intimately linked. And history is our collective memory. If our collective memory is taken from us - is rewritten - we lose the ability to sustain our true selves.

The ones who did it can always rationalize their actions and even forget what they did. They can turn away from things they dont want to see. But the surviving victims can never forget. They can’t turn away. Their memories are passed on from parent to child. That’s what the world is, after all: an endless battle of contrasting memories.

Precipitate as weather, she appeared from somewhere then evaporated, leaving only memory.

Writing from memory like this, I often feel a pang of dread. What if Ive forgotten the most important thing? What if somewhere inside me there is a dark limbo where all the the truly important memories are heaped and slowly turning into mud?

His mind floated in the amniotic fluid of memory, listening for echoes of the past. His father, meanwhile, had no idea that such a vivid scene was burned into Tengos brain or that, like a cow in the meadow, Tengo was endlessly regurgitating fragments of the scene to chew on, a cud from which he obtained essential nutrients. Father and son: each was locked in a deep, dark embrace with his secrets.

The role of a story was, in the broadest terms, to transpose a single problem into another form. ... It was like a piece of paper bearing the indecipherable text of a magic spell.