Haruki Murakami: Likeness (page 2)

“There's no such thing as perfect writing, just like there's no such thing as perfect despair.”

“Whiskey, like a beautiful woman, demands appreciation. You gaze first, then it's time to drink.”

“I am nothing. I’m like someone who’s been thrown into the ocean at night, floating all alone. I reach out, but no one is there. I call out, but no one answers. I have no connection to anything.”

“Have you ever had that feeling—that you’d like to go to a whole different place and become a whole different self?”

“I've always done whatever I felt like doing in life. People may try to stop me, and convince me I'm wrong, but I won't change.”

“What I want is for the two of us to meet somewhere by chance one day, like, passing on the street, or getting on the same bus.”

“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.”

“But what seems like a reasonable distance to one person might feel too far to somebody else.”

“In the world we live in, what weand what weare like Siamese twins, inseparable, existing in a state of confusion.”

“I'd be smiling and chatting away, and my mind would be floating around somewhere else, like a balloon with a broken string.”

“If I stayed here, something inside me would be lost forever—something I couldn't afford to lose. It was like a vague dream, a burning, unfulfilled desire. The kind of dream people have only when they're seventeen.”

“We each have a special something we can get only at a special time of our life. like a small flame. A careful, fortunate few cherish that flame, nurture it, hold it as a torch to light their way. But once that flame goes out, it’s gone forever.”

“Mediocrity is like a spot on your shirt, it never comes off.”

“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.”

“I go back to the reading room, where I sink down in the sofa and into the world of The Arabian Nights. Slowly, like a movie fadeout, the real world evaporates. I'm alone, inside the world of the story. My favourite feeling in the world.”

“Possibilities are like cancer. The more I think about them, the more they multiply, and there's no way to stop them. I'm out of control.”

“I don't know, there's something about you. Say there's an hourglass: the sand's about to run out. Someone like you can always be counted on to turn the thing over.”

“I never trust people with no appetite. It's like they're always holding something back on you.”

“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.”