Quotes by "Haruki Murakami"

With my eyes closed, I would touch a familiar book and draw its fragrance deep inside me. This was enough to make me happy.

In his or her own way, everyone I saw before me looked happy. Whether they were really happy or just looked it, I couldn't tell. But they did look happy on this pleasant early afternoon in late September, and because of that I felt a kind of loneliness new to me, as if I were the only one here who was not truly part of the scene.

There had to be something wrong with my life. I should have been born a Yugoslavian shepherd who looked up at the Big Dipper every night.

Don't blame me. That's evolution. Evolution's always hard. Hard and bleak. No such thing as happy evolution.

You make do with what you have. As you age you learn even to be happy with what you have. That’s one of the few good points of growing older.

Wasn't it better if they kept this desire to see each other hidden within them, and never actually got together? That way, there would always be hope in their hearts. That hope would be a small, yet vital flame that warmed them to their core-- a tiny flame to cup one's hands around and protect from the wind, a flame that the violent winds of reality might easily extinguish.

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.

This is what it means to live on. When granted hope, a person uses it as fuel, as a guidepost to life. It is impossible to live without hope.

Wherever there's hope there's a trial.

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.

There's no such thing as perfect writing, just like there's no such thing as perfect despair.

Hundreds of butterflies flitted in and out of sight like short-lived punctuation marks in a stream of consciousness without beginning or end.

It just happens to be the way that I'm made. I have to write things down to feel I fully comprehend them.

If you're young and talented, it's like you have wings.

The thoughts that occur to me while I’m running are like clouds in the sky. Clouds of all different sizes. They come and they go, while the sky remains the same sky always. The clouds are mere guests in the sky that pass away and vanish, leaving behind the sky.

Writing novels is much the same. You gather up bones and make your gate, but no matter how wonderful the gate might be, that alone doesn't make it a living breathing novel. A story is not something of this world. A real story requires a kind of magical baptism to link the world on this side with the world on the other side.

If she did experience sex--or something close to it--in high school, I'm sure it would have been less out of sexual desire or love than literary curiosity.

I want to write about people who dream and wait for the night to end, who long for the light so they can hold the ones they love.

Generally, people who are good at writing letters have no need to write letters. They've got plenty of life to lead inside their own context.

That's how it is with art. Mere humans who root through their refrigerators at three o'clock in the morning are incapable of such writing.