2,618 Quotes by Haruki Murakami

...if it's something a single book can explain, it's not worth having explained.

All of us, more or less, wear masks. Because without masks we can’t survive in this violent world. Beneath an evil-spirit mask lies the natural face of an angel, beneath an angel’s mask lies the face of an evil spirit. It’s impossible to have just one or the other. That’s who we are. And that’s Carnaval. Schumann was able to see the many faces of humanity—the masks and the real faces—because he himself was a deeply divided soul, a person who lived in the stifling gap in between the two.

Like a button on a shirt buttoned wrong, every attempt to correct things led to yet another fine --not to say elegant-- mess.

There's only one kind of happiness, but misfortune comes in all shapes and sizes.

Even chance meetings are the result of karma.

According to Chekhov, once a gun appears in a story, it has to be fired.

747s always remind me of a fat, ugly old lady in the neighborhood where I used to live. Huge sagging breasts, swollen legs, dried up neckline. The airport, a likely gathering place for the old ladies. Dozens of them, coming and going, one after the other.

Death was not the opposite of life. It was already here, within my being, it had always been there, and no struggle would permit me to forget that. When it too the 17-year-old Kizuki that night in May, death took me as well.

En este mundo no existe ni la bondad absoluta ni la maldad absoluta (...) El bien y el mal no son algo estático e inamovible, sino algo que siempre está cambiando de lugar y situación. La bondad puede convertirse al instante en maldad y viceversa. (...) Lo importante es preservar el equilibrio entre ese bien y ese mal en constante movimiento. Inclinándose demasiado por uno de los dos, resulta difícil mantener la moral de la vida real. Sí, el equilibrio en sí mismo es el bien.