01c. 1949 ADWell, finally, once you become an orphan, you're an orphan till the day you die. I keep having the same dream. I'm seven years old and an orphan again. All alone, with no adults around to take care of me. It's evening, and the light is fading, and night is pressing in. It's always the same. In the dream I always go back to being seven years old. Software like that you can't exchange once it's contaminated.Haruki Murakami / quote ↗
02c. 1949 ADPrecipitate as weather, she appeared from somewhere, then evaporated, leaving only memory.Haruki Murakami / quote ↗
03c. 1949 ADI think memory is the most important asset of human beings. It’s a kind of fuel; it burns and it warms you. My memory is like a chest: There are so many drawers in that chest, and when I want to be a fifteen-year-old boy, I open up a certain drawer and I find the scenery I saw when I was a boy in Kobe. I can smell the air, and I can touch the ground, and I can see the green of the trees. That’s why I want to write a book.Haruki Murakami / quote ↗
04c. 1949 ADMemory works in different ways for everybody. Different capacities, different directions, too. Sometimes memory helps you think, sometimes it impedes. Doesn’t mean it’s good or bad. Probably means it’s no big deal.Haruki Murakami / quote ↗
05c. 1949 ADYou can hide memories, but you can't erase the history that produced them.Sara looked directly into his eyesI nothing else, you need to remember that. you can't erase history, or change it. it would be like destroying yourself.Haruki Murakami / quote ↗
06c. 1949 ADRobbing people of their actual history is the same as robbing them of part of themselves. It’s a crime."Fuka-Eri thought about that for a moment.Tengo went on, “Our memory is made up of our individual memories and our collective memories. The two are intimately linked. And history is our collective memory. If our collective memory is taken from us - is rewritten - we lose the ability to sustain our true selves.Haruki Murakami / quote ↗
07c. 1949 ADThe ones who did it can always rationalize their actions and even forget what they did. They can turn away from things they don't want to see. But the surviving victims can never forget. They can’t turn away. Their memories are passed on from parent to child. That’s what the world is, after all: an endless battle of contrasting memories.Haruki Murakami / quote ↗
08c. 1949 ADWriting from memory like this, I often feel a pang of dread. What if I've forgotten the most important thing? What if somewhere inside me there is a dark limbo where all the the truly important memories are heaped and slowly turning into mud?Haruki Murakami / quote ↗
09c. 1949 ADHis mind floated in the amniotic fluid of memory, listening for echoes of the past. His father, meanwhile, had no idea that such a vivid scene was burned into Tengo's brain or that, like a cow in the meadow, Tengo was endlessly regurgitating fragments of the scene to chew on, a cud from which he obtained essential nutrients. Father and son: each was locked in a deep, dark embrace with his secrets.Haruki Murakami / quote ↗
10c. 1949 ADThe role of a story was, in the broadest terms, to transpose a single problem into another form. ... It was like a piece of paper bearing the indecipherable text of a magic spell.Haruki Murakami / quote ↗
11c. 1949 ADBut still," Ayumi said, "it seems to me that this world has a serious shortage of both logic and kindness.""You may be right," Aomame said, "But it's too late to trade it in for another one.Haruki Murakami / quote ↗
12c. 1949 ADThere is one thing I can say for certain: the older a person gets, the lonelier he becomes. It's true for everyone. But maybe that isn't wrong. What I mean is, in a sense our lives are nothing more than a series of stages to help us get used to loneliness. That being the case, there's no reason to complain. And besides who would be complaint to anyway? (A Walk To Kobe, Granta 124: Travel)Haruki Murakami / quote ↗
13c. 1949 ADall I wanted was to go off to some other world, a place beyond anybody's reach. A place beyond the flow of time.Haruki Murakami / quote ↗
14c. 1949 ADIt was a different sense of isolation from what he normally felt in Japan. And not such a bad feeling, he decided. Being alone in two senses of the word was maybe like a double negation of isolation. In other words, it made perfect sense for him, a foreigner, to feel isolated here. The thought calmed him. He was in exactly the right place.Haruki Murakami / quote ↗
15c. 1949 ADNo matter how far you travel, you can never get away from yourself. It’s like your shadow. It follows you everywhere. -KomuraHaruki Murakami / quote ↗
16c. 1949 ADThe world follows its own course. Each possesses his own thoughts, each treads his own path. So it is with your mother, and so it is with your starling. As it is with everyone. The world follows its own course.Haruki Murakami / quote ↗
17c. 1949 ADI stayed in the town until early evening, and when the sun began to sink, my heart did too. This is your last chance to go back, I told myself. Once it gets completely dark, you might never be able to leave here. I went home on the same buses that had brought me there. I arrived before seven, and no one noticed that I had run away.Haruki Murakami / quote ↗
18c. 1949 ADI am afraid to die, though,' I whispered to myself. These turned out to be my last words. They were not very impressive words, but it was too late to change them.Haruki Murakami / quote ↗
19c. 1949 ADPeople think of all kinds of things at three in the morning. We all do. That's why we each have to figure out our own way of fighting it off.Haruki Murakami / quote ↗
20c. 1949 ADThere are all kinds of things we have to deal with in life,' Eri finally said. 'And one thing always seems to connect with another. You try to solve one problem, only to find that another one you hadn't anticipated arises instead. It's not that easy to get free of them. That's true for you - and for me, too.Haruki Murakami / quote ↗
22c. 1949 ADLooking up at [the sky], I think about the October evening world, where 'people' must be going about their lives. Beneath that pale autumn light, they must be walking down streets, going to the store for things, preparing dinner, boarding trains for home. And they think--if they think at all--that these things are too obvious to think about, just as I used to do (or not do).Haruki Murakami / quote ↗
23c. 1949 ADI feel as if the world is listening for my next thought. But I can't think of anything. Sorry, but I just can't think of anything.Haruki Murakami / quote ↗
24c. 1949 ADBut even so, every now and then I would feel a violent stab of loneliness. The very water I drink, the very air I breathe, would feel like long, sharp needles. The pages of a book in my hands would take on the threatening metallic gleam of razor blades. I could hear the roots of loneliness creeping through me when the world was hushed at four o'clock in the morning.Haruki Murakami / quote ↗
