"It seems to me, though, that you always understand very well what I can't say very well. Trouble is I end up being even worse at saying things well."
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Haruki Murakami quotes (page 37 of 55)
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"Time really is one big continuous cloth, no? We habitually cut out pieces of time to fit us, so we tend to fool ourselves into thinking that time is our size, but it really goes on and on."
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"This may be the most important proposition revealed by history: At the time, no one knew what was coming."
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"It depends on which reality you take and which reality I take.” (p. 318)."
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"In traveling, a companion, in life, compassion."
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"My peak? Would I even have one? I hardly had had anything you could call a life. A few ripples, some rises and falls. But that's it. Almost nothing. Nothing born of nothing. I'd loved and been loved, but I had nothing to show. It was a singularly plain, featureless landscape. I felt like I was in a video game. A surrogate Pacman, crunching blindly through a labyrinth of dotted lines. The only certainty was my death."
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"Is it against the law for me to know it?"
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"Painful is the stress when one cannot reproduce or convey vividly to others, however hard he tries, what he's experienced so intensely."
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"Sometimes we don't need words. Rather, it's words that need us. If we were no longer here, words would lose their whole function. They would end up as words that are never spoken, and words that aren't spoken are no longer words. - (Where I'm Likely To Find It)"
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"You are 27 or 28 right? It is very tough to live at that age. When nothing is sure. I have sympathy with you."
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"Rousseau defined civilizations as when people build fences."
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"...I've just been feeling insecure since I was 20, and that's all I've been trying to express. Now the entire world is feeling insecure."
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"Ever since time began (when was that, I wonder?), it's been moving ever forward without a moment's rest. And one of the privileges given to those who've avoided dying young is the blessed right to grow old."
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"If we reverse the outer shell and the essence--in other words, consider the outer shell the essence and the essence only the shell--our lives might be a whole lot easier to understand."
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"In ancient times, people weren't just male or female, but one of three types: male/male, male/female, female/female. In other words, each person was made out of the components of two people. Everyone was happy with this arrangement and never really gave it much a thought. But then God took a knife and cut everybody in half, right down the middle. So after that the world was divided just into male and female, the upshot being that people spend their time running around trying to locate their missing other half."
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"Sometimes we don't need words. Rather, it's words that need us."
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"If, as the dowager had said, we are nothing but gene carriers, why do so many of us have to lead such strangely shaped lives? Wouldn't our genetic purpose-to transmit DNA-be served just as well if we lived simple lives, not bothering our heads with a lot of extraneous thoughts, devoted entirely to preserving life and procreating? Did it benefit the genes in any way for us to lead such intricately warped, even bizarre, lives?"
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"Two-thirds of earth's surface is ocean, and all we can see with the naked eye is the surface."
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"The world would be a pretty dull place if it were made up only of the first-rate, right?"
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"When you're young, you think you can handle anything. By the time you find out otherwise, it's already too late. You got a stocking wrapped around your neck."
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