Haruki Murakami citations

Page 22

“La symbolique est indissociable de la poésie, comme le rhum l’est des pirates.”

“devil's tounge.”

“… je veux dire par là que, dans le cadre d’une réalité
particulière […], le sens pratique doit
faire condamner l’absence de particularité en tant que phénomène paradoxalement particulier.”

“Nos cœurs ne sont pas de pierre. Les pierres peuvent s’effondrer et se briser, perdre leur forme. Mais le cœur ne peut pas s’effondrer. Le cœur n’a pas de forme mais il peut se propager à l’infini.”

“« Voilà ce que vivre signifie », comprit Aomamé en un éclair. L’espoir est le combustible que les hommes brûlent pour pouvoir vivre. Impossible de vivre sans espoir. Mais c’est comme une pièce qu’on jette en l’air. Pile? Face? On le saura quand elle sera retombée, pas avant. Ses pensées angoissantes lui broyaient le cœur, si fort qu’elle sentait tous ses os crier.”

“Les souvenirs, c'est quelque chose qui vous réchauffe de l'intérieur. Et qui vous déchire violemment le cœur en même temps.”

“« Si vous n’avez jamais lu Hamlet au cours de votre vie, c’est comme si vous l’aviez passée au fond d’une mine de charbon ».”

“Des occasions précieuses, des possibilités, des sentiments qu’on ne pourra pas retrouver. C’est cela aussi, vivre. Mais à l’intérieur de notre esprit – je crois que c’est à l’intérieur de notre esprit, il y a une petite pièce dans laquelle nous stockons le souvenir de toutes ces occasions perdues. Une pièce avec des rayonnages, comme dans cette bibliothèque, j’imagine. Et il faut que nous fabriquions un index, avec des cartes de références, pour connaître précisément ce qu’il y a dans nos cœurs. Il faut aussi balayer cette pièce, l’aérer, changer l’eau des fleurs. En d’autres termes, tu devras vivre dans ta propre bibliothèque.”

“Une âme solitaire errant le long d’un rivage absurde battu par les flots. C’est peut-être la signification de ce nom : Kafka.”

“C’est le surf qui m’a appris à ne pas
lutter contre la force de la nature. Quelle que soit la violence des vagues
qu’on doit affronter.”

“Enfin, il se passait quelque chose, je me sentais vivre. Je ne m’usais pas. En tout cas, il existait une partie de moi qui ne se consumait pas. Et c’est pour ça que je me sentais réellement vivre. Je trouve qu’une existence humaine, même si elle dure très longtemps, n’a aucun sens si l’on n’a pas le sentiment de vivre."

in "Sommeil”

“Je pense que j’ai soif d’égalité et de justice autant que
n’importe qui. Mais je déteste par-dessus tout les gens qui manquent
d’imagination. Ceux que T. S. Eliot appelait « les hommes vides ».
Ils bouchent leur vide avec des brins de paille qu’ils ne sentent pas, et ne se
rendent pas compte de ce qu’ils font. Et avec leurs mots creux, ils essaient
d’imposer leur propre insensibilité aux autres.”

“Ce ne sont pas les humains qui choisissent leur destin mais le destin qui choisit les humains. Voilà la vision du monde essentielle de la tragédie grecque. Et la tragédie – d’après Aristote – prend sa source, ironiquement, non pas dans les défauts mais dans les vertus des personnages. Tu comprends ce que je veux dire? Ce ne sont pas leurs défauts, mais leurs vertus qui entraînent les humains vers les plus grandes tragédies. Œdipe roi de Sophocle, en est un remarquable exemple. Ce ne sont pas sa paresse ou sa stupidité qui le mènent à la catastrophe mais son courage et son honnêteté. Il naît de ce genre de situation une ironie inévitable.”

“Parfois, le destin ressemble à une tempête de sable qui se déplace sans cesse. Tu modifies ton allure pour lui échapper. Mais la tempête modifie aussi la sienne. Tu changes à nouveau le rythme de ta marche, et la tempête change son rythme elle aussi. C'est sans fin, cela se répète un nombre incalculable de fois, comme une danse macabre avec le dieu de la Mort, juste avant l'aube. Pourquoi? parce que la tempête n'est pas un phénomène venu d'ailleurs sans aucun lien avec toi. Elle est toi même et rien d'autre. elle vient de l'intérieur de toi. Alors la seule chose que tu puisses faire, c'est pénétrer délibérément dedans, fermer les yeux et te boucher les oreilles afin d'empêcher le sable d'y entrer, et la traverser pas à pas. Au coeur de cette tempête, il n'y a pas de soleil, il n'y a pas de lune, pas de repère dans l'espace; par moments, même, le temps n'existe plus. Il n'y a que du sable blanc et fin comme des os broyés qui tourbillonne haut dans le ciel. Voilà la tempête de sable que tu dois imaginer.”

“Les deux coudes sur la table, j'enfouis mon visage dans mes paumes. Au fond de ces ténèbres, je pensai à la mer sous la pluie. Il pleuvait sans bruit sur le vaste océan à l'insu du monde entier. Les gouttes frappaient la surface des eaux en silence, et même les poissons n'en avaient pas conscience.”

“Sa volubilité était une sorte de prélude intellectuel à l'acte sexuel. Les fonctions leur effleuraient le dos, les théorèmes exhalaient leur souffle tiède à leur oreille.”

“Ce que l'Histoire enseigne de plus important aux hommes pourrait se formuler ainsi : "À l'époque, personne ne savait ce qui allait arriver.”

“Le temps passait. Les particules de ténèbres dessinaient d'étranges figures sur ma rétine. Au bout d'un moment, ces figures s'écroulaient sans bruit, puis d'autres se formaient. Dans l'espace immobile comme du mercure, seule bougeait la nuit.”

“Je Bouge, Donc Je Suis”

“Nakata let his body relax, switched off his mind, allowing things to flow through him. This was natural for him, something he'd done ever since he was a child, without a second thought. Before long the borders of his consciousness fluttered around, just like the butterflies. Beyond these borders lay a dark abyss. Occasionally his consciousness would fly over the border and hover over that dizzying, black crevass. But Nakata wasn't afraid of the darkness or how deep it was. And why should he be? That bottomless world of darkness, that weighty silence and chaos, was an old friend, a part of him already. Nakata understood this well. In that world there was no writing, no days of the week, no scary Governor, no opera, no BMWs. No scissors, no tall hats. On the other hand, there was also no delicious eel, no tasty bean-jam buns. Everything is there, but there are no parts. Since there are no parts, there's no need to replace one thing with another. No need to remove anything, or add anything. You don't have to think about difficult things, just let yourself soak it all in. For Nakata, nothing could be better.”

“The elevator continued its impossibly slow ascent. Or at least I imagined it was ascent. There was no telling for sure: it was so slow that all sense of direction simply vanished. It could have been going down for all I knew, or maybe it wasn’t moving at all. But let’s just assume it was going up. Merely a guess. Maybe I’d gong up twelve stories, then down three. Maybe I’d circled the globe. How would I know?”

“I was twenty-one at the time, about to turn twenty-two. No prospect of graduating soon, and yet no reason to quit school. Caught in the most curiously depressing circumstances. For months I'd been stuck, unable to take one step in any new direction. The world kept moving on; I alone was at a standstill. In the autumn, everything took on a desolate cast, the colors swiftly fading before my eyes. The sunlight, the smell of the grass, the faintest patter of rain, everything got on my nerves.”

“You still don't get it, do you? We're talking about a revelation here," Colonel Sanders said, clicking his tongue. "A revelation leaps over the borders of the everyday. A life without revelation is no life at all. What you need to do is move from reason that observes to reason that acts. That's what's critical. Do you have any idea what I'm talking about, you gold-plated whale of a dunce?”

“My biggest fault is that the faults I was born with grow bigger each year. It's like I was raising chickens inside of me. The chickens lay their eggs and the eggs hatch into other chickens, which then lay eggs.”

“He inherited from his mother's stories the fundamental style he used, unaltered, in his own stories: namely, the assumption that fact may not be truth, and truth may not be factual.”

“The world of the grotesque is the darkness within us. Well before Freud and Jung shined a light on the workings of the subconscious, this correlation between darkness and our subconscious, these two forms of darkness, was obvious to people. It wasn't a metaphor, even. If you trace it back further, it wasn't even a correlation. Until Edison invented the electric light, most of the world was totally covered in darkness. The physical darkness outside and the inner darkness of the soul were mixed together, with no boundary separating the two. They were directly linked. Like this.”

“Works that have a certain imperfection to them have an appeal for that you're attracted to Soseki's The Miner. There's something in it that draws you in, more than more fully realized novels like Kokoro or Sanshiro. You discover something about that work that tugs at your heart-or maybe we should say that work discovers you.”

“I said this one day to the doctor in charge of my case, and he told me that, in a sense, what I was feeling was right, that we are in here not to correct the deformation but to accustom ourselves to it: that one of our problems was our inability to recognize and accept our own deformities. Just as each person has certain idiosyncrasies in the way he or she walks, people have idiosyncrasies in the way they think and feel and see things, …”

“Fairness is a concept that holds only in limited situations. Yet we want the concept to extend to everything, in and out of phase. From snails to hardware stores to married life. Maybe no one finds it, or even misses it, but fairness is like love. What is given has nothing to do with what we seek.”

“Where does your responsibility begin here? Wiping away the nebula from your sight, you struggle to find where you really are. You're trying to find the direction of the flow, struggling to hold on to the axis of time. But you can't locate the borderline separating dream and reality. Or even the boundary between what's real and what's possible. All you're sure of is that you're in a delicate position. Delicate-and dangerous. You're pulled along, a part of it, unable to pin down the principles of prophecy, or of logic. Like when a river overflows, washing over a town, all road signs have sunk beneath the waves. And all you can see are the anonymous roofs of the sunken houses.”

“The world would be a pretty dull place if it were made up only of the first-rate, right?”

“In a letter from Naoko, Norwegian Wood”

“You build up relationships like that one after another and before you know it you have meaning. The more connections, the deeper the meaning. Doesn't matter if it's eel, or rice bowls, or grilled fish, whatever. Get it?”

“Everybody has some one thing they do not want to lose," began the man. "You included. And we are professionals at finding out that very thing. Humans by necessity must have a midway point between their desires and their pride. Just as all objects must have a center of gravity. This is something we can pinpoint. Only when it is gone do people realize it even existed.”

“There's that kind of money in the world. It aggravates you to have it, makes you miserable to spend it, and you hate yourself when it's gone. And when you hate yourself, you feel like spending money. Except there's no money left. And no hope.”

“The basic stupidity of modern Japan is that we’ve learned absolutely nothing from our contact with other Asian peoples.”

“Money had no name of course. And if it did have a name, it would no longer be money. What gave money its true meaning was its dark-night namelessness, its breathtaking interchangeability.”

“First, about the mind. You tell me there is no fighting or hatred or desire in the Town. That this is a beautiful dream, and I do want your happiness. But the absence of fighting or hatred or desire also means the opposites do not exist either. No joy, no communion, no love. Only where there is disillusionment and depression and sorrow does happiness arise; without the despair of loss, there is no hope.”

“Seeing a lot of water like that every day is probably an important thing for human beings. For human beings might be a bit of a generalization—but I do know it’s important for one person: me. If I go for a time without seeing water, I feel like something’s slowly draining out of me. It’s probably like the feeling a music lover has when, for whatever reason, he’s separated from music for a long time. The fact that I was raised near the sea might have something to do with it.”

“You are a beautiful person, Doctor. Clearheaded. Strong. But you seem always to be dragging your heart along the ground. From now on, little by little, you must prepare yourself to face death. If you devote all of your future energy to living, you will not be able to die well. You must begin to shift gears, a little at a time. Living and dying are, in a sense, of equal value.”

“I watched an old American submarine movie on television. The creaking plot had the captain and first officer constantly at each other’s throat. The submarine was a fossil, and one guy had claustrophobia. But all that didn’t stop everything from working out well in the end. It was an everything-works-out-in-the-end-so-maybe-war’s-not-so-bad-after-all sort of film. One of these days they’ll be making a film where the whole human race gets wiped out in a nuclear war, but everything works out in the end.”

“I'm a very ordinary human being; I just happen to like reading books.”

“I’m not particularly interested in collecting things, but there’s one sort of running motif in my life: despite my basic indifference, objects just seem to collect around me, of their own volition.”