"There’s nothing wrong with not looking like something. It just means you don’t fit the stereotype yet."
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Quote collection
Haruki Murakami quotes (page 32 of 55)
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"Inside him, twenty years dissolved and mixed into one complex, swirling whole. Everything that had accumulated over the years-- all he had seen, all the words he has spoken, all the values he had held-- all of it coalesced into one solid, thick pillar in his heart, the core of which was spinning like a potter's wheel. Wordlessly, Tengo observed the scene, as if watching the destruction and rebirth of a planet."
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"A person's last moments are an important thing. You can't choose how you're born but you can choose how you die."
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"The morning air of the pasture turned steadily cooler. Day by day, the bright golden leaves of the birches turned more spotted as the first winds of winter slipped between the withered branches and across the highlands toward the southeast. Stopping in the center of the pasture, I could hear the winds clearly. No turning back, they pronounced. The brief autumn was gone."
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"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."
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"This is the extent of his knowledge of the sea: it was very big, it was salty, and fish lived there."
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"I laughed. “You’re too young to be so … pessimistic,” I said, using the English word. “Pessi-what?” “Pessimistic. It means looking only at the dark side of things.” “Pessimistic … pessimistic …” She repeated the English to herself over and over, and then she looked up at me with a fierce glare. “I’m only sixteen,” she said, “and I don’t know much about the world, but I do know one thing for sure. If I’m pessimistic, then the adults in this world who are not pessimistic are a bunch of idiots."
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"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."
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"I write weird stories. I don't know why I like weirdness so much ... But when I write, I write weird. That's very strange. When I'm getting more and more serious, I'm getting more and more weird."
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"Time moves in it special way in the middle of the night."
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"In the end, like so many beautiful promises in our lives, that dinner date never came to be."
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"The world in books seemed so much more alive to me than anything outside. I could see things I'd never seen before. Books and music were my best friends. I had a couple of good friends at school, but never met anyone I could really speak my heart to."
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"Whether in music or in fiction, the most basic thing is rhythm. Your style needs to have good, natural, steady rhythm, or people won't keep reading your work."
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"In my younger days, I was trying to write sophisticated prose and fantastic stories."
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"It was a narrow world, a world that was standing still. But the narrower it became, the more it betook of stillness, the more this world that enveloped me seemed to overflow with things and people that could only be called strange. They had been there all the while, it seemed, waiting in the shadows for me to stop moving. And every time the wind-up bird came to my yard to wind its spring, the world descendedmore deeply into chaos."
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"The little things are important, Mr. Wind-Up Bird."
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"To keep on going, you have to keep up the rhythm."
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"Once thing goes wrong, then the whole house of cards collapses. And there's no way you can extricate yourself. Until someone comes along to drag you out."
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"What if I’ve forgotten the most important thing?"
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"When someone is trying very hard to get something, they don't. And when they're running away from something as hard as they can, it usually catches up with them."
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