2,618 Quotes by Haruki Murakami

He spent day after day feeling uneasy and muddled, like someone who has mistakenly swallowed a thick swatch of cloud.

The sky both exists and doesn’t exist. It has substance and at the same time doesn’t. And we merely accept that vast expanse and drink it in.

We truly believed in something back then, and we knew we were the kind of people capable of believing in something –with all our hearts. And that kind of hope will never simply vanish.

If I sound as if I'm always predicting ominous things, it's because I'm a pragmatist. I use deductive reasoning to generalize, and I suppose this sometimes ends up sounding like unlucky prophecies. You know why? Because reality's just the accumulation of ominous prophecies come to life. You have to only open a newspaper on any given day and weigh the good news versus the bad, and you'll see what I mean.

To be a Russian writer at the end of the nineteenth century must have meant bearing an inescapably bitter fate. The more they tried to escape from Russia, the more deeply Russia swallowed them.

— Любити писання — це найважливіша якість людини, що готується стати письменником.— Однак цього не досить.— Звичайно. Лише цього не досить. У творі має бути щось особливе. Принаймні щось, чого не можна вичитати до кінця в самому тексті. Якщо торкнутися прози, то понад усе я ставлю твори, в яких є щось недомовлене. Коли, прочитавши твір, я все зрозумів, то втрачаю до нього цікавість. Мовляв, це ж очевидно. Дуже просто.

Certe cose quando se ne parla diventano una menzogna.

No, he thought, I’m not cool and collected, and I’m not always doing things at my own pace. It’s just a question of balance. I’m just good at habitually shifting the weight I carry around from one side of the fulcrum to the other, distributing it. Maybe this strikes others as cool. But it isn’t an easy operation. It takes more time than it seems. And even if I do find the right balance, that doesn’t lessen the total weight one bit.

Some people get a kick out of reading railway timetables and that's all they do all day. Some people make huge model boats out of matchsticks. So what's wrong if there happens to be one guy in the world who enjoys trying to understand you?""Kind of like a hobby?" she said, amused."Yeah I guess you could call it a hobby. Most normal people would call it friendship or love or something, but if you want to call it a hobby, that's OK too.