Quotes by Haruki Murakami

Thinking about lunch. Smoked salmon with pedigreed lettuce and razor-sharp slices of onion that have been soaked in ice water, brushed with horseradish and mustard, served on French butter rolls baked in the hot ovens of Kinokuniya. A sandwich made in heaven

I said nothing for a time, just ran my fingertips along the edge of the human-shaped emptiness that had been left inside me.

The silence is so deep it hurts our ears

A moderate silence ensued. A neutral-to-slightly-positive silence. True, silence is still silence, except when you think about it too much.

It was a stillness so profound one had to adjust one’s hearing to it.....The silence seemed to be trying to tell him something about itself.

I shouted into the phone, but there was no reply. Silence floated up from the receiver like smoke from the mouth of a gun.

Were the stars out when I left the house last evening? All I could remember was the couple in the Skyline listening to Duran Duran. Stars? Who remembers stars? Come to think of it, had I even looked up at the sky recently? Had the stars been wiped out of the sky three months ago, I wouldnt have known. The only things I noticed were silver bracelets on womens wrists and popsicle sticks in potted rubber plants. There had to be something wrong with my life. I should have been born a Yugoslavian shepherd who looked up at the Big Dipper every night. No car, no car stereo, no silver bracelets, no shuffling, no dark blue tweed suits.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.My first circuit must have been wearing thin. My real memories were receding into planar projection, the screen of consciousness losing all identity.

I feel very strongly that all Japanese at that time had the idea drilled into them of 1999 being the end of the world. Aum renunciates have already accepted, inside themselves, the end of the world, because when they become a renunciate, they discard themselves totally, thereby abandoning the world. In other words, Aum is a collection of people who have accepted the end. People who continue to hold out hope for the near future still have an attachment to the world. If you have attachments, you will not discard your Self, but for Renunciates its as if theyve leaped right off the cliff. And taking a giant leap like that feels good. They lose something - but gain something in return.

Sometimes I just get tired. I get headaches, and I just lose track. I mean, its like which is me and which is the role? Wheres the line between me and my shadow?

Sorels basic character flaws had all cemented by the age of fifteen, a fact which further elicited my sympathy. To have all the building blocks of your life in place by that age was, by any standard, a tragedy. It was as good as sealing yourself into a dungeon. Walled in, with nowhere to go but your own doom. Walls. A world completely surrounded by walls.

She was seriously in love, but she never made demands.

My words did not seem to reach her. Or, if they did, she was unable to grasp their meaning.

I dont know, its stupid being 20, she said. Im just not ready. It feels weird. Like somebodys pushing me from behind.

I dont deserve a girl like Hatsumi, Nagasawa once said to me. I had to agree with him.

A cell is just a room if you dont lock the door.

Energies expended on sideshows, never on the main event. Where the hell was the main event? Was there a main event?

Im still not sure I made the right choice when I told my wife about the bakery attack.But then,it might not have been a question of right or wrong. Which is to say that wrong choices can produce right results, and vice versa. I myself have adopted the position that,in fact, we never choose anything at all. Things happen. Or not.

If you have to choose between something that has form and something that doesnt, go for the one without form. Thats my rule.

In ancient times, people werent just male or female, but one of three types: male/male, male/female, female/female. In other words, each person was made out of the components of two people. Everyone was happy with this arrangement and never really gave it much a thought. But then God took a knife and cut everybody in half, right down the middle. So after that the world was divided just into male and female, the upshot being that people spend their time running around trying to locate their missing other half.

People do change. And no matter how close we once were, and how much we opened up to each other, maybe neither of us know anything substantial about the other.