Haruki Murakami Quotes - Page 5

Everything was too sharp and clear, so that I could never tell where to start- the way a map that shows too much can sometimes be useless.

Only by learning the truth - whatever that truth might be - could people be given the right kind of power.

Whether you take the doughnut hole as a blank space or as an entity unto itself is a purely metaphysical question and does not affect the taste of the doughnut one bit.

Snow floated down every once in a while, but it was frail snow, like a memory fading into the distance.

Es decir..., lo que yo creo es que el hombre piensa en el significado de la vida porque sabe con certeza que va morir algún día. (...) Nadie sabe lo que va a ocurrir. Por eso nosotros, para evolucionar necesitamos la muerte.

It's like Tolstoy said. Happiness is an allegory, unhappiness a story.

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.

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

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.

No truth can cure the sorrow we feel from losing a loved one. No truth, no sincerity, no strength, no kindness can cure that sorrow. All we can do is see it through to the end and learn something from it, but what we learn will be no help in facing the next sorrow that comes to us without warning.

People leave strange little memories of themselves behind when they die.

Tell me, Doctor, are you afraid of death?"
"I guess it depends on how you die.

Those were strange days, now that I look back at them. In the midst of life, everything revolved around death.

That's the kind of death that frightens me. The shadow of death slowly, slowly eats away at the region of life, and before you know it everything's dark and you can't see, and the people around you think of you as more dead than alive.

I’ve never once thought about how I was going to die,” she said. “I can’t think about it. I don’t even know how I’m going to live.

Life is here, death is over there. I am here, not over there.

Death leaves cans of shaving cream half-used.

A poet might die at twenty-one, a revolutionary or a rock star at twenty four. But after that you assume everything’s going to be all right. you’ve made it past Dead Man’s Curve and you’re out of the tunnel, cruising straight for your destination down a six lane highway whether you want it or not.

I find myself thinking about my ongoing existence as a human being and the path that lies ahead of me. Though of course these thoughts lead to but one place - death.