Haruki Murakami

“Memory is a funny thing. When I was in the scene, I hardly paid it any mind. I never stopped to think of it as something that would make a lasting impression, certainly never imagined that eighteen years later I would recall it in such detail. I didn't give a damn about the scenery that day. I was thinking about myself. I was thinking about the beautiful girl walking next to me. I was thinking about the two of us together, and then about myself again. It was the age, that time of life when every sight, every feeling, every thought came back, like a boomerang, to me. And worse, I was in love. Love with complications. The scenery was the last thing on my mind.”

“Los pensamientos que acuden a mi mente cuando corro se parecen a las nubes del cielo. Nubes de diversas formas y tamaños. Nubes que vienen y se van. Pero el cielo siempre es el cielo. Las nubes son sólo meras invitadas. Algo que pasa de largo y se dispersa. Y sólo queda el cielo. El cielo es algo que, al tiempo que existe, no existe. Algo material y a la vez, inmaterial. Y a nosotros no nos queda sino aceptar ka existencia de ese inmenso recipiente tal cual es e intentar ir asimilándolo.”

“In his or her own way, everyone I saw before me looked happy. Whether they were really happy or just looked it, I couldn't tell. But they did look happy on this pleasant early afternoon in late September, and because of that I felt a kind of loneliness new to me, as if I were the only one here who was not truly part of the scene.”

“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.”

“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 that's it. Almost nothing. Nothing born of nothing. I'd 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.”

“People die all the time. Life is a lot more fragile than we think. So you should treat others in a way that leaves no regrets. Fairly, and if possible, sincerely. It's too easy not to make the effort, then weep and wring your hands after the person dies.”

“Time expands, then contracts, all in tune with the stirrings of the heart.”

“A person learns how to love himself through the simple acts of loving and being loved by someone else.”

“For a while is a phrase whose length can’t be measured. At least by the person who’s waiting,” I said (...)And probably is a word whose weight is incalculable.”

“I'm not afraid to die. What I'm afraid of is having reality get the better of me, of having reality leave me behind.”

“I'm tired of living unable to love anyone. I don't have a single friend - not one. And, worst of all, I can't even love myself. Why is that? Why can't I love myself? It's because I can't love anyone else. A person learns how to love himself through the simple acts of loving and being loved by someone else. Do you understand what I am saying? A person who is incapable of loving another cannot properly love himself.”

“No se debe oponer resistencia a la corriente: hay que ir hacia arriba cuando hay que ir hacia arriba, y hacia abajo cuando hay que ir hacia abajo. Cuando debas ir hacia arriba, busca la torre más alta y sube hasta la cúspide. Cuando debas ir hacia abajo, busca el pozo más profundo y desciende hasta el fondo. Cuando no haya corriente, quédate inmóvil. Si te opones a la corriente todo se seca, el mundo se ve envuelto por las tinieblas. "Yo soy yo, él es yo, atardecer de otoño" Cuando renuncias a mi, yo existo.”

“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.”

“I think you still love me, but we can’t escape the fact that I’m not enough for you. I knew this was going to happen. So I’m not blaming you for falling in love with another woman. I’m not angry, either. I should be, but I’m not. I just feel pain. A lot of pain. I thought I could imagine how much this would hurt, but I was wrong.”

“Unfortunately, the clock is ticking, the hours are going by. The past increases, the future recedes. Possibilities decreasing, regrets mounting.”

“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.”

“It's like Tolstoy said. Happiness is an allegory, unhappiness a story.”

“Most things are forgotten over time. Even the war itself, the life-and-death struggle people went through is now like something from the distant past. We’re so caught up in our everyday lives that events of the past are no longer in orbit around our minds. There are just too many things we have to think about everyday, too many new things we have to learn. But still, no matter how much time passes, no matter what takes place in the interim, there are some things we can never assign to oblivion, memories we can never rub away. They remain with us forever, like a touchstone.”

“And it came to me then. That we were wonderful traveling companions but in the end no more than lonely lumps of metal in their own separate orbits. From far off they look like beautiful shooting stars, but in reality they're nothing more than prisons, where each of us is locked up alone, going nowhere. When the orbits of these two satellites of ours happened to cross paths, we could be together. Maybe even open our hearts to each other. But that was only for the briefest moment. In the next instant we'd be in absolute solitude. Until we burned up and became nothing.”

“If you can love someone with your whole heart, even one person, then there's salvation in life. Even if you can't get together with that person.”

“Love can rebuild the world, they say, so everything's possible when it comes to love.”

“It's easy to talk big, but the important thing is whether or not you clean up the shit.”

“I find myself thinking about my ongoing existence as a human being and the path that lies ahead of me. Though of course these thoughts lead to but one place - death.”

“here she is, all mine, trying her best to give me all she can. How could I ever hurt her? But I didn’t understand then. That I could hurt somebody so badly she would never recover. That a person can, just by living, damage another human being beyond repair.”

“Loving another person is a wonderful thing, and if that love is sincere, no one ends up tossed into a labyrinth. You have to have more faith in yourself.”

“People fall in love without reason, without even wanting to. You can't predict it. That's love.”

“Es decir..., lo que yo creo es que el hombre piensa en el significado de la vida porque sabe con certeza que va morir algún día. (...) Nadie sabe lo que va a ocurrir. Por eso nosotros, para evolucionar necesitamos la muerte.”

“Like most novelists, I like to do exactly the opposite of what I'm told. It's in my nature as a novelist. Novelists can't trust anything they haven't seen with their own eyes or touched with their own hands. (Jerusalem Prize acceptance speech, JERUSALEM POST, Feb. 15, 2009)”

“People have their own reasons for dying. It might look simple, but it never is. It's just like a rock. What's above ground is only a small part of it. But if you start pulling, it keeps coming and coming. The human mind dwells deep in darkness. Only the person himself knows the real reason, and maybe not even then.”

“The passage of time will usually extract the venom of most things and render them harmless”

“That's 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 everything's dark and you can't see, and the people around you think of you as more dead than alive.”

“Everything was too sharp and clear, so that I could never tell where to start- the way a map that shows too much can sometimes be useless.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Maybe it's just hiding somewhere. Or gone on a trip to come home. But falling in love is always a pretty crazy thing. It might appear out of the blue and just grab you. Who knows — maybe even tomorrow.”

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

“I have a million things to talk to you about. All I want in this world is you. I want to see you and talk. I want the two of us to begin everything from the beginning.”

“If you remember me, then I don't care if everyone else forgets.”

“If there's any guy crazy enough to attack me, I'm going to show him the end of the world -- close up. I'm going to let him see the kingdom come with his own eyes. I'm going to send him straight to the southern hemisphere and let the ashes of death rain all over him and the kangaroos and the wallabies.”

“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.”

“That’s how stories happen — with a turning point, an unexpected twist. There’s only one kind of happiness, but misfortune comes in all shapes and sizes. It’s like Tolstoy said. Happiness is an allegory, unhappiness a story.”

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

“For a long time, she held a special place in my heart. I kept this special place just for her, like a "Reserved" sign on a quiet corner table in a restaurant. Despite the fact that I was sure I'd never see her again.”

“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.”

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

“Time flows in strange ways on Sundays, and sights become mysteriously distorted.”

“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.”

“Person A understand Person B because the time is right for that to happen, not because Person B wants to be understood by Person A.”

“I don't go out of my way to make friends, that's all.”

“Despite your best efforts, people are going to be hurt when it's time for them to be hurt.”

“Death leaves cans of shaving cream half-used.”

“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. ”

“With my eyes closed, I would touch a familiar book and draw its fragrance deep inside me. This was enough to make me happy. ”

“Suicides? Heart attacks? The papers didn't seem interested. The world was full of ways to die, too many to cover. Newsworthy deaths had to be exceptional. Most people go unobserved.”

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

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

“Sometimes I get real lonely sleeping with you.”

“But hell, you've gotta work with what you've got.”

“I guess time doesn't flow in order, does it - A, B, C, D? It just sort of goes where it feels like going.”

“Don't blame me. That's evolution. Evolution's always hard. Hard and bleak. No such thing as happy evolution.”

“Death is not the opposite of life, but a part of it.”