Haruki Murakami: Trending quotes (page 23)

“The fresh smell of coffee soon wafted through the apartment, the smell that separates night from day.”

“You throw a stone into a deep pond. Splash. The sound is big, and it reverberates throughout the surrounding area. What comes out of the pond after that? All we can do is stare at the pond, holding our breath.”

“Listen up—there’s no war that will end all wars,’ Crow tells me. ‘War breeds war. Lapping up the blood shed by violence, feeding on wounded flesh. War is a perfect, self-contained being. You need to know that.”

“Sometimes I feel as if I'm racing with my own shadow, Korogi says. But that's one thing I'll never be able to outrun. Nobody can shake off their own shadow.”

“At the same time, my anxiety had turned into an anxiety quite lacking in anxiousness. And any anxiety that is not especially anxious is, in the end, an anxiety hardly worth mentioning.”

“What we needed were not words and promises but the steady accumulation of small realities.”

“You know what it’s like when you’re trying to fall asleep and it only makes you more wide awake?”

“I don't really know if it's the right thing to do, making new life. Kids grow up, generations take their place. What does it all come to? More hills bulldozed and more ocean fronts filled in? Faster cars and more cats run over? Who needs it?”

“I’m me, and at the same time not me. That’s what it felt like. A very still, quiet feeling.”

“It is the same with anything - you have to learn through your own experience, paying your own way. You can't learn it from a book.”

“Ordinary imperfect people, always choose similarly imperfect people as friends.”

“Her voice was like a line from an old black-and-white Jean-Luc Godard movie, filtering in just beyond the frame of my consciousness.”

“I was feeling lonely without her, but the fact that I could feel lonely at all was consolation. Loneliness wasn't such a bad feeling. It was like the stillness of the pin oak after the little birds had flown off.”

“If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking.”

“The truth sometimes reminds me of a city buried in sand. As time passes, the sand piles up even thicker, and occasionally it's blown away and what's below is revealed.”

“To be able to talk to your heart’s content about a book you like with someone who feels the same way about it is one of the greatest joys that life can offer.”

“I’m the kind of person who likes to be by himself. To put a finer point on it, I’m the type of person who doesn’t find it painful to be alone”

“Sometimes when I'm with you, I remember things I lost when I was your age. Like I remember the sound of the rain and the smell of the wind.”

“Strong and independent? I’m neither. I’m just being pushed along by reality, whether I like it or not.”