Haruki Murakami Quotes

"She waited for the train to pass. Then she said, "I sometimes think that people’s hearts are like deep wells. Nobody knows what’s at the bottom. All you can do is imagine by what comes floating to the surface every once in a while.

I'd be smiling and chatting away, and my mind would be floating around somewhere else, like a balloon with a broken string.

"For a while" is a phrase whose length can't be measured.At least by the person who's waiting.

Unclose your mind. You are not a prisoner. You are a bird in fight, searching the skies for dreams.

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 have this strange feeling that I'm not myself anymore. It's hard to put into words, but I guess it's like I was fast asleep, and someone came, disassembled me, and hurriedly put me back together again. That sort of feeling.

So what’s wrong if there happens to be one guy in the world who enjoys trying to understand you?

"What makes us the most normal," said Reiko, "is knowing that we're not normal."

Chance encounters are what keep us going.

Not that we were incompatible: we just had nothing to talk about.

No matter how vivid memories may be, they can’t win out against the power of time.

Lost opportunities, lost possibilities, feelings we can never get back. That's part of what it means to be alive. But inside our heads - at least that's where I imagine it - there's 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, you'll live forever in your own private library.

Only the Dead stay seventeen forever.

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.

I began to draw an invisible boundary between myself and other people. No matter who I was dealing with. I maintained a set distance, carefully monitoring the person’s attitude so that they wouldn’t get any closer. I didn’t easily swallow what other people told me. My only passions were books and music