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Killing time is not an easy job.
HARUKI MURAKAMI, Dance, Dance, Dance
When you're young, you think you can handle anything. By the time you find out otherwise, it's already too late. You got a stocking wrapped around your neck.
HARUKI MURAKAMI, Dance, Dance, Dance
To me, love is a pure idea forged in flesh, awkwardly maybe, but it had to connect to somewhere, despite twists and turns of underground cable. An all-too-perfect thing. Sometimes the lines get crossed. Or you get a wrong number. But that's nobody's fault. It'll always be like that, so long as we exist in this physical form. As a matter of principle.
HARUKI MURAKAMI, Dance, Dance, Dance
Of course you got rights, the law's on your side, but sometimes the law takes a long time to kick in and so it gets put in the hands of us poor suckers on duty. You get my drift?
HARUKI MURAKAMI, Dance, Dance, Dance
Every one of us is losing something precious to us. Lost opportunities, lost possibilities, feelings we can never get back again. That's part of what it means to be alive.
HARUKI MURAKAMI, Kafka on the Shore
Possibilities are like cancer. The more I think about them, the more they multiply, and there's no way to stop them.
HARUKI MURAKAMI, Dance, Dance, Dance
When there's nothing to do, you do nothing slowly and intently.
HARUKI MURAKAMI, Dance, Dance, Dance
Advanced capitalism has transcended itself. Not to overstate things, financial dealings have practically become a religious activity. The new mysticism. People worship capital, adore its aura, genuflect before Porsches and Tokyo land values. Worshiping everything their shiny Porsches symbolize. It's the only stuff of myth that's left in the world.
HARUKI MURAKAMI, Dance, Dance, Dance
I used to think the years would go by in order, that you get older one year at a time ... but it's not like that. It happens overnight.
HARUKI MURAKAMI, Dance, Dance, Dance
If you're young and talented, it's like you have wings.
HARUKI MURAKAMI, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running
Why do people have to be this lonely? What's the point of it all? Millions of people in this world, all of them yearning, looking to others to satisfy them, yet isolating themselves. Why? Was the earth put here just to nourish human loneliness?
HARUKI MURAKAMI, Sputnik Sweetheart
"For a while" is a phrase whose length can't be measured. At least by the person who's waiting.
HARUKI MURAKAMI, South of the Border, West of the Sun
I felt like I was in a video game. A surrogate Pacman, crunching blindly through a labyrinth of dotted lines. The only certainty was my death.
HARUKI MURAKAMI, Dance Dance Dance
If you can't understand it without an explanation, you can't understand it with an explanation.
HARUKI MURAKAMI, 1Q84
No truth can cure the sorrow we feel from losing a loved one. No truth, no sincerity, no strength, no kindness can cure that sorrow. All we can do is see it through to the end and learn something from it, but what we learn will be no help in facing the next sorrow that comes to us without warning.
HARUKI MURAKAMI, Norwegian Wood
Not just beautiful, though--the stars are like the trees in the forest, alive and breathing. And they're watching me.
HARUKI MURAKAMI, Kafka on the Shore
I can bear any pain as long as it has meaning.
HARUKI MURAKAMI, 1Q84
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 a long process and that you'll work on things slowly, one at a time.
HARUKI MURAKAMI, Norwegian Wood
Newsworthy deaths had to be exceptional. Most people go unobserved.
HARUKI MURAKAMI, Dance Dance Dance
Opera lovers may be the narrowest people in the world.
HARUKI MURAKAMI, After the Quake
I'd made it back to the land of the living. No matter how boring or mediocre a world it might be, this was it.
HARUKI MURAKAMI, A Wild Sheep Chase
The sky grew darker, painted blue on blue, one stroke at a time, into deeper and deeper shades of night.
HARUKI MURAKAMI, Dance Dance Dance
There's only one kind of happiness, but misfortune comes in all shapes and sizes.
HARUKI MURAKAMI, Kafka on the Shore
Mountains, according to the angle of view, the season, the time of day, the beholder's frame of mind, or any one thing, can effectively change their appearance. Thus, it is essential to recognize that we can never know more than one side, one small aspect of a mountain.
HARUKI MURAKAMI, A Wild Sheep Chase
So the fact that I'm me and no one else is one of my greatest assets. Emotional hurt is the price a person has to pay in order to be independent.
HARUKI MURAKAMI, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running
You can have tons of talent, but it won't necessarily keep you fed. If you have sharp instincts, though, you'll never go hungry.
HARUKI MURAKAMI, 1Q84
Human beings are ultimately nothing but carriers -- passageways -- for genes. They ride us into the ground like racehorses from generation to generation. Genes don't think about what constitutes good or evil. They don't care whether we are happy or unhappy. We're just means to an end for them.
HARUKI MURAKAMI, 1Q84
So that's how we live our lives. No matter how deep and fatal the loss, no matter how important the thing that's stolen from us--that's snatched right out of our hands--even if we are left completely changed, with only the outer layer of skin from before, we continue to play out our lives this way, in silence. We draw ever nearer to the end of our allotted span of time, bidding it farewell as it trails off behind. Repeating, often adroitly, the endless deeds of the everyday. Leaving behind a feeling of immeasurable emptiness.
HARUKI MURAKAMI, Sputnik Sweetheart
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