Quotes by Haruki Murakami

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.

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

Once she called to invite me to a concert of Liszt piano concertos. The soloist was a famous South American pianist. I cleared my schedule and went with her to the concert hall at Ueno Park. The performance was brilliant. The soloists technique was outstanding, the music both delicate and deep, and the pianists heated emotions were there for all to feel. Still, even with my eyes closed, the music didnt sweep me away. A thin curtain stood between myself and pianist, and no matter how much I might try, I couldnt get to the other side. When I told Shimamoto this after the concert, she agreed.But what was wrong with the performance? she asked. I thought it was wonderful.Dont you remember? I said. The record we used to listen to, at the end of the second movement there was this tiny scratch you could hear. Putchi! Putchi! Somehow, without that scratch, I cant get into the music!Shimamoto laughed. I wouldnt exactly call that art appreciation.This has nothing to do with art. Let a bald vulture eat that up, for all I care. I dont care what anybody says; I like that scratch!Maybe youre right, she admitted. But whats this about a bald vulture? Regular vultures I know about--they eat corpses. But bald vultures?In the train on the way home, I explained the difference in great detail.The difference in where they are born, their call, their mating periods. The bald vulture lives by devouring art. The regular vulture lives by devouring the corpses of unknown people. Theyre completely different.Youre a strange one! She laughed. And there in the train seat, ever so slightly, she moved her shoulder to touch mine. The one and only time in the past two months our bodies touched.

Wasnt it better if they kept this desire to see each other hidden within them, and never actually got together? That way, there would always be hope in their hearts. That hope would be a small, yet vital flame that warmed them to their core-- a tiny flame to cup ones hands around and protect from the wind, a flame that the violent winds of reality might easily extinguish.

We truly believed in something back then, and we knew we were the kind of people capable of believing in something - with all our hearts. And that kind of hope will never simply vanish.

This is what it means to live on. When granted hope, a person uses it as fuel, as a guidepost to life. It is impossible to live without hope.

Wherever theres hope theres a trial.

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. All we can do is see it through to the end and learn something from it, but what we learn will be no help in facing the next sorrow that comes to us without warning.

People leave strange little memories of themselves behind when they die.

Tell me, Doctor, are you afraid of death?I guess it depends on how you die.

Arent you afraid of dying?Not really. Ive watched lots of good-for-nothing, worthless people die, and if people like that can do it, then I should be able to handle it.

My peak? Would I even have one? I hardly had had anything you could call a life. A few ripples. some rises and falls. But thats it. Almost nothing. Nothing born of nothing. Id loved and been loved, but I had nothing to show. It was a singularly plain, featureless landscape. I felt like I was in a video game. A surrogate Pacman, crunching blindly through a labyrinth of dotted lines. The only certainty was my death.

Life is here, death is over there. I am here, not over there.

Those were strange days, now that I look back at them. In the midst of life, everything revolved around death.

Im not afraid to die. What Im afraid of is having reality get the better of me, of having reality leave me behind.

Its unfair.As a rule, life is unfair, I said.Yeah, but I think I did say some awful things.To Dick?Yeah.I pulled the car over to the shoulder of the road and turned off the ignition. Thats just stupid, that kind of thinking, I said, nailing her with my eyes. Instead of regretting what you did, you could have treated him decently from the beginning. You couldve tried to be fair. But you didnt. You dont even have the right to be sorry.

Thats the kind of death that frightens me. The shadow of death slowly, slowly eats away at the region of life, and before you know it everythings dark and you cant see, and the people around you think of you as more dead than alive.

I’ve never once thought about how I was going to die,” she said. “I can’t think about it. I don’t even know how I’m going to live.

Death leaves cans of shaving cream half-used.

A poet might die at twenty-one, a revolutionary or a rock star at twenty four. But after that you assume everything’s going to be all right. you’ve made it past Dead Man’s Curve and you’re out of the tunnel, cruising straight for your destination down a six lane highway whether you want it or not.