Quotes by Haruki Murakami

History cannot be erased or altered.Because that would mean killing yourself.

One by one, Ill face the tasks before me and complete them as best I can. Focusing on each stride forward, but at the same time taking a long-range view, scanning the scenery as far ahead as I can. I am, after all, a long distance runner.My time, the rank I attain, my outward appearance - all of these are secondary. For a runner like me, whats really important is reaching the goal I set myself, under my own power. I give it everything I have, endure what needs enduring, and am able, in my own way, to be satisfied. From out of the failures and joys I always try to come away having grasped a concrete lesson. (Its got to be concrete, no matter how small it is.) And I hope that, over time, as one race follows another, in the end Ill reach a place Im content with. Or maybe just catch a glimpse of it.

True, luck may rule over parts of a persons life and luck may cast patches of shadow across the ground of our being, but where theres a WILL-- much less a strong will to swim thirty laps or run twenty kilometers -- theres a way to overcome most any trouble with whatever stepladders you have around.

For me, running is both exercise and a metaphor. Running day after day, piling up the races, bit by bit I raise the bar, and by clearing each level I elevate myself. At least that’s why I’ve put in the effort day after day: to raise my own level. I’m no great runner, by any means. I’m at an ordinary – or perhaps more like mediocre – level. But that’s not the point. The point is whether or not I improved over yesterday. In long-distance running the only opponent you have to beat is yourself, the way you used to be.

peoples hearts are like deep wells. Nobody knows whats at the bottom. All you can do is guess from what comes floating to the surface every once in a while

I was the chain that bit into my ankle, and I was the ruthless guard that never slept.

But like a boat with a twisted rudder, I kept coming back to the same place. I wasnt going anywhere. I was myself, waiting on the shore for me to return. Was that so depressing?Who knows? Maybe that was despair. What Turgenev called disillusionment. Or Dostoyevsky, hell. Or Somerset Maugham, reality. Whatever the label, I figured it was me.

My world foreshortened, flattening into a credit card. Seen head on, things seemed merely skewed, but from the side the view was virtually meaningless--a one-dimensional wafer. Everything about me may have been crammed in there, but it was only plastic. Indecipherable except to some machine.

Once he gets to the fort the colonel turns to John Wayne and says, I did see a few Indians on the way over here. And John Wayne, with this really cool look on his face, replies, Dont worry. If you were able to spot some Indians, that means there werent any there. I dont remember the actual lines, but it went something like that. Do you get what he means?

... And that has remained an important mental landscape for me, a reference point. It teaches me something — or tries to. People need things like that to go on living — mental landscapes that have meaning for then, even if they cant explain them in words. Part of why we live is to come up with explanations for these things. That what I think.

Putting it into words will destroy any meaning.

Sitting on the floor, Id replay the past in my head. Funny, thats all I did, day after day after day for half a year, and I never tired of it. What Id been through seemed so vast, with so many facets. Vast, but real, very real, which was why the experience persisted in towering before me, like a monument lit up at night. And the thing was, it was a monument to me.

You can hide memories, suppress them, but you can’t erase the history that produced them

But thing in the past are like plate that’s shattered to pieces. You can never put it back together like it was, right?

Thats evolution. Evolutions always hard. Hard and bleak. No such thing as happy evolution

If something came out of the deal, it couldn’t make things any worse for us than they already were, I thought. But I couldn’t have been more wrong. Hell has no true bottom.

suffering is a misunderstood pain

I am living in hell from one day to the next. But there is nothing I can do to escape. I dont know where I would go if I did. I feel utterly powerless, and that feeling is my prision. I entered of my own free will, I locked the door, and I threw away the key.

Im going to live to be twenty-five, she said, then die.

Her words didn’t have the acrid smell of death.