Quotes by Haruki Murakami

Maybe its just hiding somewhere. Or gone on a trip to come home. But falling in love is always a pretty crazy thing. It might appear out of the blue and just grab you. Who knows — maybe even tomorrow.

Love can rebuild the world, they say, so everythings possible when it comes to love.

People fall in love without reason, without even wanting to. You cant predict it. Thats love.

Time expands, then contracts, all in tune with the stirrings of the heart.

A person learns how to love himself through the simple acts of loving and being loved by someone else.

Losing you is most difficult for me, but the nature of my love for you is what matters. If it distorts into half-truth, then perhaps it is better not to love you. I must keep my mind but loose you.

Quizás aun no te comprenda. Pero, con un poco de tiempo, llegaré a entenderte. Y no habrá nadie en el mundo que te comprenda mejor que yo.

Nobody likes being alone that much. I dont go out of my way to make friends, thats all. It just leads to disappointment.

No matter how much suffering you went through, you never wanted to let go of those memories.

Lost opportunities, lost possibilities, feelings we can never get back. Thats part of what it means to be alive. But inside our heads - at least thats where I imagine it - theres a little room where we store those memories. A room like the stacks in this library. And to understand the workings of our own heart we have to keep on making new reference cards. We have to dust things off every once in awhile, let in fresh air, change the water in the flower vases. In other words, youll live forever in your own private library.

Death is not the opposite of life, but a part of it.

Every one of us is losing something precious to us. Lost opportunities, lost possibilities, feelings we can never get back again. That’s part of what it means to be alive.

In everybody’s life there’s a point of no return. And in a very few cases, a point where you can’t go forward anymore. And when we reach that point, all we can do is quietly accept the fact. That’s how we survive.

Heres what I think, Mr. Wind-Up Bird, said May Kasahara. Everybodys born with some different thing at the core of their existence. And that thing, whatever it is, becomes like a heat source that runs each person from the inside. I have one too, of course. Like everybody else. But sometimes it gets out of hand. It swells or shrinks inside me, and it shakes me up. What Id really like to do is find a way to communicate that feeling to another person. But I cant seem to do it. They just dont get it. Of course, the problem could be that Im not explaining it very well, but I think its because theyre not listening very well. They pretend to be listening, but theyre not, really. So I get worked up sometimes, and I do some crazy things.

Most everything you think you know about me is nothing more than memories.

You know what I think? she says. That peoples memories are maybe the fuel they burn to stay alive. Whether those memories have any actual importance or not, it doesnt matter as far as the maintenance of life is concerned. Theyre all just fuel. Advertising fillers in the newspaper, philosophy books, dirty pictures in a magazine, a bundle of ten-thousand-yen bills: when you feed em to the fire, theyre all just paper. The fire isnt thinking Oh, this is Kant, or Oh, this is the Yomiuri evening edition, or Nice tits, while it burns. To the fire, theyre nothing but scraps of paper. Its the exact same thing. Important memories, not-so-important memories, totally useless memories: theres no distinction--theyre all just fuel.

When you come out of the storm, you won’t be the same person who walked in. That’s what this storm’s all about.

Life is not like water. Things in life dont necessarily flow over the shortest possible route.

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.

The sense of tragedy - according to Aristotle - comes, ironically enough, not from the protagonists weak points but from his good qualities. Do you know what Im getting at? People are drawn deeper into tragedy not by their defects but by their virtues....[But] we accept irony through a device called metaphor. And through that we grow and become deeper human beings.