Quotes by Haruki Murakami

No truth can cure the sorrow we feel from losing a loved one. No truth, no sincerity, no strength, no kindness can cure that sorrow.

I suddenly thought about my old girlfriend, the one I had first slept with in my third year of high school. Chills ran through me as I realized how badly I had treated her. I had hardly ever thought about her thoughts or feelings or the pain I had caused her. She was such a sweet and gentle thing, but at the time I had taken her sweetness for granted and later hardly gave her a second thought. What was she doing now? I wondered. And had she forgiven me?

I thought about Kizuki. So you finally made Naoko yours, I heard myself telling him. Oh, well, she was yours to begin with. Now maybe, shes where she belongs. But in this world, in this imperfect world of the living, I did the best I could for Naoko.

I straightened up and looked out the plane window at the dark clouds hanging over the North Sea, thinking of what I had lost in the course of my life: times gone forever, friends who had died or disappeared, feelings I would never know again.

I know, too, why she asked me not to forget her. Naoko herself knew, of course. She knew that my memories of her would fade. Which is precisely why she begged me never to forget her, to remember that she had existed. The thought fills me with an almost unbearable sorrow. Because Naoko never loved me.

...and we go on living and breathing it into our lungs like fine dust.Until that time, I had understood death as something entirely separate from and independent of life. The hand of death is bound to take us, I had felt, but until the day it reaches out for us, it leaves us alone. This had seemed to me the simple, logical truth. Life is here, death is over there. I am here, not over there.

I was living for one thing only, and that was to confirm my own lack of feeling.

Slowly like a movie fade out, the real world evaporates. Im alone, inside the world of the story. My favorite feeling in the world.

And then it struck him what lay buried far down under the earth on which his feet were so firmly planted: the ominous rumbling of the deepest darkness, secret rivers that transported desire, slimy creatures writhing, the lair of earthquakes ready to transform whole cities into mounds of rubble. These, too, were helping to create the rhythm of the earth. He stopped dancing and, catching his breath, stared at the ground beneath his feet as though peering into a bottomless hole.

There is an instinctive withdrawal for the sake of preservation, a closure that assumes the order of completion. Winter is a season unto itself.

There are symbolic dreams-dreams that symbolize some reality. Then there are symbolic realities-realities that symbolize a dream

Thats gotta be one of the principles behind reality. Accepting things that are hard to comprehend, and leaving them that way.

A gust of wind set the leaves of grass to dancing and celebrated the grasss song before it died.

I mean, public libraries like this one were always short of money, so building even the tiniest of labyrinths had to be beyond their means.

But metaphors help eliminate what separates you and me.

The whole universe is like some big FedEx box.

...All without any more sound than flipping over a playing card. And sitting in this limo, compared to my fifteen-year-old Volkswagen Beetle Id bought off a friend, was as quiet as sitting at the bottom of a lake wearing earplugs.

As I run I tell myself to think of a river. And clouds. But essentially Im not thinking of a thing. All I do is keep on running in my own cozy, homemade void, my own nostalgic silence. And this is a pretty wonderful thing. No matter what anybody else says.

I had several girlfriends, but nothing lasted. I’d date one for a few months, and then start thinking: This isn’t what I want.

Are you asking because you really want an answer?