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Haruki Murakami

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Name supplied in the contributor-provided quotation collection. Basic attribution label; identity, lifetime and quotation authenticity have not been independently verified.

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Archive entries

01Undated

Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional.

Haruki Murakami / quote

02Undated

And once the storm is over, you won’t remember how you made it through, how you managed to survive. You won’t even be sure, whether the storm is really over. But one thing is certain. When you come out of the storm, you won’t be the same person who walked in. That’s what this storm’s all about.

Haruki Murakami / quote

03Undated

Time weighs down on you like an old, ambiguous dream. You keep on moving, trying to sleep through it. But even if you go to the ends of the earth, you won't be able to escape it. Still, you have to go there- to the edge of the world. There's something you can't do unless you get there.

Haruki Murakami / quote

04Undated

According to Aristophanes in Plato's The Banquet, in the ancient world of legend there were three types of people.In ancient times people weren't simply male or female, but one of three types : male/male, male/female or female/female. In other words, each person was made out of the components of two people. Everyone was happy with this arrangment and never really gave it much thought. But then God took a knife and cut everyone in half, right down the middle. So after that the world was divided just into male and female, the upshot being that people spend their time running around trying to locate their missing half.

Haruki Murakami / quote

05Undated

It's easy to forget things you don't need anymore.

Haruki Murakami / quote

06Undated

When you are used to the kind of life -of never getting anything you want- you stop knowing what it is you want.

Haruki Murakami / quote

07Undated

When someone is trying very hard to get something, they don't. And when they're running away from something as hard as they can, it usually catches up with them.

Haruki Murakami / quote

08Undated

I do feel that I’ve managed to make something I could maybe call my world…over time…little by little. And when I’m inside it, to some extent, I feel kind of relieved. But the very fact I felt I had to make such a world probably means that I’m a weak person, that I bruise easily, don’t you think? And in the eyes of society at large, that world of mine is a puny little thing. It’s like a cardboard house: a puff of wind might carry it off somewhere.

Haruki Murakami / quote

09Undated

Whether you take the doughnut hole as a blank space or as an entity unto itself is a purely metaphysical question and does not affect the taste of the doughnut one bit.

Haruki Murakami / quote

10Undated

Me, I've seen 45 years, and I've only figured out one thing. That's this: if a person would just make the effort, there's something to be learned from everything. From even the most ordinary, commonplace things, there's always something you can learn. I read somewhere that they said there's even different philosophies in razors. Fact is, if it weren't for that, nobody'd survive.

Haruki Murakami / quote

11Undated

Snow floated down every once in a while, but it was frail snow, like a memory fading into the distance.

Haruki Murakami / quote

12Undated

The darkness behind my closed eyelids was like the cloud-covered sky, but the gray was somewhat deeper. Every few minutes, someone would come and paint over the gray with a different-textured gray - one with a touch of gold or green or red. I was impressed with the variety of grays that existed. Human beings were so strange. All you had to do was sit still for ten minutes, and you could see this amazing variety of grays.

Haruki Murakami / quote

13Undated

Latter-day capitalism. Like it or not, it's the society we live in. Even the standard of right and wrong has been subdivided, made sophisticated. Within good, there's fashionable good and unfashionable good, and ditto for bad. Within fashionable good, there's formal and then there's casual; there's hip, there's cool, there's trendy, there's snobbish. Mix 'n' match. Like pulling on a Missoni sweater over Trussardi slacks and Pollini shoes, you can now enjoy hybrid styles of morality. It's the way of the world -- philosophy starting to look more and more like business administration.

Haruki Murakami / quote

14Undated

This is one more piece of advice I have for you: don't get impatient. Even if things are so tangled up you can't do anything, don't get desperate or blow a fuse and start yanking on one particular thread before it's ready to come undone. You have to realize it's going to be along process and that you'll work on things slowly, one at a time.

Haruki Murakami / quote

15Undated

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.

Haruki Murakami / quote

16Undated

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

Haruki Murakami / quote

17Undated

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

Haruki Murakami / quote

18Undated

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.

Haruki Murakami / quote

19Undated

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.

Haruki Murakami / quote

20Undated

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)

Haruki Murakami / quote

21Undated

Only by learning the truth—whatever that truth might be—could people be given the right kind of power.

Haruki Murakami / quote

22Undated

If you think God’s there, He is. If you don’t, He isn’t. And if that’s what God’s like, I wouldn’t worry about it.

Haruki Murakami / quote

23Undated

The Boss is an honorable man. After the Lord, the most godly person I've ever met.""You've met God?""Certainly. I telephone Him every night.

Haruki Murakami / quote

24Undated

In the name of God, they stole her time and her freedom, putting shackles on her heart. They preached about God's kindness, but preached twice as much about his wrath and intolerance.

Haruki Murakami / quote