2,618 Quotes by Haruki Murakami

My world foreshortened, flattening into a credit card. Seen head on, things seemed merely skewed, but from the side the view was virtually meaningless--a one-dimensional wafer. Everything about me may have been crammed in there, but it was only plastic. Indecipherable except to some machine.

Sorel's basic character flaws had all cemented by the age of fifteen, a fact which further elicited my sympathy. To have all the building blocks of your life in place by that age was, by any standard, a tragedy. It was as good as sealing yourself into a dungeon. Walled in, with nowhere to go but your own doom. Walls. A world completely surrounded by walls.

Our hearts are not stones. A stone may disintegrate in time and lose its outward form. But hearts never disintegrate. They have no outward form, and whether good or evil, we can always communicate them to one another.

Dreams are things from the past. They aren't from the future. That wasn't you imprisoned there. You imprison your dreams. You understand?Yeah, I'd say. But I wasn't convinced.

To conserve energy, her little planet stopped spinning.

A healthy amount of fear and respect might be a good idea

all I wanted was to go off to some other world, a place beyond anybody's reach. A place beyond the flow of time.

fleas are like a bad habit—awfully hard to get rid of once you get them

It was a different sense of isolation from what he normally felt in Japan. And not such a bad feeling, he decided. Being alone in two senses of the word was maybe like a double negation of isolation. In other words, it made perfect sense for him, a foreigner, to feel isolated here. The thought calmed him. He was in exactly the right place.