Haruki Murakami Quotes - Page 11

All alone in an unfamiliar place, like some solitary explorer who's lost his compass and his map. Is this what it means to be free?
Haruki Murakami
Now for a good twelve-hour sleep, I told myself. Twelve solid hours. Let birds sing, let people go to work. Somewhere out there, a volcano might blow, Israeli commandos might decimate a Palestinian village. I couldn't stop it. I was going to sleep.
Haruki Murakami
Jean-Jacques Rousseau defined civilization as when people build fences. A very perceptive observation. And it’s true—all civilization is the product of a fenced-in lack of freedom. The Australian Aborigines are the exception, though. They managed to maintain a fenceless civilization until the seventeenth century. They’re dyed-in-the-wool free. They go where they want, when they want, doing what they want. Their lives are a literal journey. Walkabout is a perfect metaphor for their lives. When the English came and built fences to pen in their cattle, the Aborigines couldn’t fathom it. And, ignorant to the end of the principle at work, they were classified as dangerous and antisocial and were driven away, to the outback. So I want you to be careful. The people who build high, strong fences are the ones who survive the best. You deny that reality only at the risk of being driven into the wilderness yourself.
Haruki Murakami
Strictly speaking, it might not be a dream. It was reality, but a reality imbued with all the qualities of a dream. A different sphere of reality, where - at a special time and place - imagination had been set free.
Haruki Murakami
It's all a question of imagination. Our responsibility begins with the power to imagine.
Haruki Murakami
If only I could fallsound asleep and wake up in my old reality!
Haruki Murakami
I have these realistic dreams and snap wide awake in the middle of the night. And for a while I can't work out what's real and what isn't... That kind of feeling. Do you have any idea what I'm saying?
Haruki Murakami
Have your dream...What you need now more than anything is discipline. Cast off mere words. Words turn into stone. (from Thailand)
Haruki Murakami
Don't tell me anymore. You should have your dream, as the old woman told you to. I understand how you feel, but if you put those feelings into words they will turn into lies. (from Thailand)
Haruki Murakami
I closed my eyes and tried to sleep. But it was not until much later that I was able to get any real sleep. In a place far away from anyone or anywhere, I drifted off for a moment.
Haruki Murakami
There are symbolic dreams-- dreams that symbolize some reality. Then there are symbolic realities -- realities that symbolize a dream. Symbols are what you might call the honorary town councillors of the worm universe. In the worm universe, there is nothing unusual about a dairy cow seeking a pair of pliers. A cow is bound to get her pliers sometime. It has nothing to do with me.
Haruki Murakami
In dreams begins responsiblities.
Haruki Murakami
In dreams you don't need to make any distinctions between things. Not at all. Boundaries don't exist. So in dreams there are hardly ever collisions. Even if there are, they don't hurt. Reality is different. Reality bites. Reality, reality.
Haruki Murakami
Dreams come from the past, not from the future. Dreams shouldn't control you--you should control them.
Haruki Murakami
I dream. Sometimes I think that's the only right thing to do.
Haruki Murakami
The answer is dreams. Dreaming on and on. Entering the world of dreams and never coming out. Living in dreams for the rest of time.
Haruki Murakami
Listen up - there's no war that will end all wars.
Haruki Murakami
I all of a sudden got to feeling like talking to people. Whenever I look at the ocean, I always want to talk to people, but when I’m talking to people, I always want to look at the ocean. I’m weird like that.
Haruki Murakami
Don’t you see? You and he might never cross paths again. Of course, a chance meeting could occur, and I hope it happens. I really do, for your sake. But realistically speaking, you have to see there’s a huge possibility you’ll never be able to meet him again. And even if you do meet, he might already be married to somebody else. He might have two kids. Isn’t that so? And in that case, you may have to live the rest of your life alone, never being joined with the one person you love in all the world. Don’t you find that scary?
Haruki Murakami
Can'ttrustpeople. Won'tdoanygood. They'llkillyoueverytime. They'llkilleachother. They'llkilleveryone.
Haruki Murakami
People lose fifty million skin cells every day. The cells get scraped off and turn into invisible dust, and disappear into the air. Maybe we are nothing but skin cells as far as the world is concerned.
Haruki Murakami
When people tell a lie about something, they have to make up a bunch of lies to go with the first one. ‘Mythomania’ is the word for it.
Haruki Murakami
I think that my job is to observe people and the world, and not to judge them. I always hope to position myself away from so-called conclusions. I would like to leave everything wide open to all the possibilities in the world.
Haruki Murakami
I have met many different people in the course of my life, some of whom I have come to know pretty well, but where these three traits are concerned, I had never encountered anyone before Seiji Ozawa with whom I found it so easy and natural to identify. In that sense, he is a precious person to me. It sets my mind at ease to know that there is someone like him in the world.
Haruki Murakami
In that sense, this is not a standard book of interviews. Nor is it what you might call a book of 'celebrity conversations.' What I was searching for - with increasing clarity as the sessions progressed - was something akin to the heart's natural resonance. What I did my best to hear, of course, was that resonance coming from Ozawa's heart. After all, in our conversations I was the interviewer and he was the interviewee. But what I often heard at the same time was the resonance of my own heart. At times that resonance was something I recognized as having long been a part of me, and at other times it came as a complete surprise. In other words, through a kind of sympathetic vibration that occurred during all of these conversations, I may have been simultaneously discovering Seiji Ozawa and, bit by bit, Haruki Murakami.
Haruki Murakami
It's not right for one friend to do all the giving and the other to do all the taking: that's not read friendship.
Haruki Murakami
Even now, whenever I think of her, I envision a quiet Sunday morning. A gentle, clear day, just getting under way. No homework to do, just a Sunday when you could do what you wanted. She always gave me this kick-back-and-relax, Sunday-morning kind of feeling.
Haruki Murakami
I myself, as I’m writing, don’t know who did it. The readers and I are on the same ground. When I start to write a story, I don’t know the conclusion at all and I don’t know what’s going to happen next. If there is a murder case as the first thing, I don’t know who the killer is. I write the book because I would like to find out. If I know who the killer is, there’s no purpose to writing the story.
Haruki Murakami
From the moment of my birth, I lived with pain at the center of my life. My only purpose in life was to find a way to coexist with intense pain.
Haruki Murakami
A healthy amount of fear and respect might be a good idea
Haruki Murakami
The journey I'm taking is inside me. Just like blood travels down veins, what I'm seeing is my inner self and what seems threatening is just the echo of the fear in my heart.
Haruki Murakami
He was a far more voracious reader than me, but he made it a rule to never touch a book by any author who had not been dead at least 30 years. "That's the only kind of book I can trust," he said."It's not that I don't believe in contemporary literature," he added, "but I don't want to waste valuable time reading a book that has not had the baptism of time. Life is too short.
Haruki Murakami
He was a far more voracious reader than me, but he made it a rule never to touch a book by any author who had not been dead at least 30 years. "That's the only kind of book I can trust," he said."It's not that I don't believe in contemporary literature," he added, "but I don't want to waste valuable time reading any book that has not had the baptism of time. Life is too short.
Haruki Murakami
Somewhere between 'not enough' and 'not at all.' I was always hungry for love. Just once, I wanted to know what it was like to get my fill of it - to be fed so much love I couldn't take any more. Just once. But they never gave that to me. Never, not once.
Haruki Murakami
The years nineteen and twenty are a crucial stage in the maturation of character, and if you allow yourself to become warped when you're that age, it will cause you pain when you're older.
Haruki Murakami
Have books ‘happened’ to you? Unless your answer to that question is ‘yes,’ I’m unsure how to talk to you
Haruki Murakami
There weren't any curtains in the windows, and the books that didn't fit into the bookshelf lay piled on the floor like a bunch of intellectual refugees.
Haruki Murakami
When I open them, most of the books have the smell of an earlier time leaking out between the pages - a special odor of the knowledge and emotions that for ages have been calmly resting between the covers. Breathing it in, I glance through a few pages before returning each book to its shelf.
Haruki Murakami
If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking.
Haruki Murakami
When I was little, I had this science book. There was a section on 'What would happen to the world if there was no friction?' Answer: 'Everything on earth would fly into space from the centrifugal force of revolution.' That was my mood.
Haruki Murakami
Human beings are ultimately nothing but carriers-passageways- for genes. They ride us into the ground like racehorses from generation to generation. Genes don't think about what constitutes good or evil. They don't care whether we are happy or unhappy. We're just means to an end for them. The only thing they think about is what is most efficient for them.
Haruki Murakami
Sheep hurt my father, and through my father, sheep have also hurt me.
Haruki Murakami
Time does not expand.""But time is actually expanding, isn't it? You yourself said that time adds up.""That's only because time needed for transit has decreased. The sum total of time doesn't change. It's only that you can see more movies.
Haruki Murakami
If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking.
Haruki Murakami
When I was little, I had this science book. There was a section on 'What would happen to the world if there was no friction?' Answer: 'Everything on earth would fly into space from the centrifugal force of revolution.' That was my mood.
Haruki Murakami
Human beings are ultimately nothing but carriers-passageways- for genes. They ride us into the ground like racehorses from generation to generation. Genes don't think about what constitutes good or evil. They don't care whether we are happy or unhappy. We're just means to an end for them. The only thing they think about is what is most efficient for them.
Haruki Murakami
Sheep hurt my father, and through my father, sheep have also hurt me.
Haruki Murakami
Time does not expand.""But time is actually expanding, isn't it? You yourself said that time adds up.""That's only because time needed for transit has decreased. The sum total of time doesn't change. It's only that you can see more movies.
Haruki Murakami
Every story has a time to be told
Haruki Murakami
The passage of time will usually extract the venom of most things and render them harmless
Haruki Murakami
I guess time doesn't flow in order, does it - A, B, C, D? It just sort of goes where it feels like going.
Haruki Murakami
Silence. How long it lasted, I couldn't tell. It might have been five seconds, it might have been a minute. Time wasn't fixed. It wavered, stretched, shrank. Or was it me that wavered, stretched, and shrank in the silence? I was warped in the folds of time, like a reflection in a fun house mirror.
Haruki Murakami
Time really is one big continuous cloth, no? We habitually cut out pieces of time to fit us, so we tend to fool ourselves into thinking that time is our size, but it really goes on and on.
Haruki Murakami
Time flows in strange ways on Sundays, and sights become mysteriously distorted.
Haruki Murakami
For a while" is a phrase whose length can't be measured.At least by the person who's waiting.
Haruki Murakami
Unfortunately, the clock is ticking, the hours are going by. The past increases, the future recedes. Possibilities decreasing, regrets mounting.
Haruki Murakami
Things change everyday. With each new dawn, it is not the same world as before. And you’re not the same person you were either.
Haruki Murakami
Tendencies. Yougottendencies. Soevenifyoudideverythingoveragain, yourwholelife, yougottendenciestodojustwhatyoudid, alloveragain. -The Sheep Man.
Haruki Murakami
It's just a feeling I have. What you see with your eyes is not necessarily real. My enemy is, among other things, the me inside me.
Haruki Murakami
In traveling, a companion, in life, compassion,'" she repeats, making sure of it. If she had paper and pencil, it wouldn't surprise me if she wrote it down. "So what does that really mean? In simple terms." I think it over. It takes me a while to gather my thoughts, but she waits patiently. "I think it means," I say, "that chance encounters are what keep us going. In simple terms.
Haruki Murakami