2,618 Quotes by Haruki Murakami

This is pretty obvious, but until things happen, they haven’t happened. And often things aren’t what they seem.

Sometimes I feel like a caretaker of a museum – a huge, empty museum where no one ever comes, and I’m watching over it for no one but myself.

You have to patiently learn to live together with your shadow. And carefully observe the darkness that resides within you. Sometimes in a dark tunnel you have to confront your own dark side.

Everybody has to start somewhere. You have your whole future ahead of you. Perfection doesn’t happen right away.

Long after the firefly had disappeared, the trail of its light remained inside me, its pale, faint glow hovering on and on in the thick darkness behind my eyelids like a lost soul. More than once I tried stretching my hand out in the dark. My fingers touched nothing. The faint glow remained, just beyond my grasp.

What’s nurtured slowly grows well.

Our memory is made up of our individual memories and our collective memories. The two are intimately linked. And history is our collective memory. If our collective memory is taken from us – is rewritten – we lose the ability to sustain our true selves.

I’ve built a wall around me, never letting anybody inside and trying not to venture outside myself.

I didn’t have much to say to anybody but kept to myself and my books. With my eyes closed, I would touch a familiar book and draw it’s fragrance deep inside me. This was enough to make me happy.