"That's how people live in the real world: forcing stuff on each other."
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Haruki Murakami quotes (page 14 of 55)
1.1K quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"The silence grew deeper, so deep that if you listened carefully you might very well catch the sound of the earth revolving on its axis."
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"The better you were able to imagine what you wanted to imagine, the farther you could flee from reality."
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"What the world needs is a set villain that people can point at and say, “It’s all your fault!"
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"If you want everything to be nice and straight all the time, then go live in a world made with a triungular ruler."
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""They tell us that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself, but I don't believe that." he said. Then, a moment later, he added: "Oh, the fear is there, all right. It comes to us in many different forms, at different times, and overwhelms us. But the most frightening thing we can do at such times is to turn our backs on it, to close our eyes. For then we take the most precious thing inside us and surrender it to something else. In my case, that something was the wave.""
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"How many times have you said, 'This is it. I've finally found my one true love'? And how many times has the reality turned out differently? Paperback romances and fairy tales promote an ideal of a first and only love, but few of us can claim to have had such uncomplicated good fortune. For most people, the process of finding the perfect partner is one trial and error: breakups, makeups, missed opportunities and misunderstandings. Human love is a fragile creation, and sometimes the smallest thing - the wrong choice of words or a single clumsy gesture - can make love shatter, stall or fade away."
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"If you never noticed, it never happened."
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"A friend to kill time is a friend sublime."
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"He felt as if his heart had dried up. I needed her he thought. I needed someone like her to fill the void inside me. But I wasn’t able to fill the void inside her. Until the bitter end, the emptiness inside her was hers alone."
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"There has to be pain. That's the rule."
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"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."
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"Then when dusk began to settle he would retrace his steps, back to his own world. And on the way home, a loneliness would always claim his heart. He could never quite get a grip on what it was. It just seemed that whatever lay waiting "out there" was all too vast, too overwhelming for him to possibly ever make a dent in."
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"When a writer develops a story, he is confronted with a poison that is inside him. If you don't have that poison, your story will be boring and uninspired. It's like fugu: The flesh of the pufferfish is extremely tasty, but the roe, the liver, the heart can be lethally toxic."
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"In Japan they prefer the realistic style. They like answers and conclusions, but my stories have none. I want to leave them wide open to every possibility. I think my readers understand that openness."
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"Knowledge and ability were tools, not things to show off."
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"Life's no piece of cake, mind you, but the recipe's my own to fool with."
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"You're wrong. The mind is not like raindrops. It does not fall from the skies, it does not lose itself among other things. If you believe in me at all, then believe this: I promise you I will find it. Everything depends on this." "I believe you," she whispers after a moment. "Please find my mind."
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"If you're young and talented, it's like you have wings."
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"In certain areas of my life, I actively seek out solitude. Especially for someone in my line of work, solitude is, more or less, an inevitable circumstance. Sometimes, however, this sense of isolation, like acid spilling out of a bottle, can unconsciously eat away at a person's heart and dissolve it. You could see it, too, as a kind of double-edged sword. It protects me, but at the same time steadily cuts away at me from the inside."
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