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Haruki Murakami

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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.
From Norwegian Wood
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Topic: Death
Death leaves cans of shaving cream half-used.
From Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World
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Topic: Death
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.
From The Elephant Vanishes
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XXX
Topic: Death
Time weighs down on you like an old, ambiguous dream. You keep on moving, trying to sleep through it. But even if you go to the ends of the earth, you won't be able to escape it. Still, you have to go there- to the edge of the world. There's something you can't do unless you get there.
From Kafka on the Shore
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XXX
Topic: Inspirational
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.
From 1Q84
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XXX
Topic: Hope
Most things are forgotten over time. Even the war itself, the life-and-death struggle people went through is now like something from the distant past. We’re so caught up in our everyday lives that events of the past are no longer in orbit around our minds. There are just too many things we have to think about everyday, too many new things we have to learn. But still, no matter how much time passes, no matter what takes place in the interim, there are some things we can never assign to oblivion, memories we can never rub away. They remain with us forever, like a touchstone.
From Kafka on the Shore
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XXX
Topic: Life
Nobody's going to win all the time. On the highway of life you can't always be in the fast lane.
From What I Talk About When I Talk About Running
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XXX
Topic: Life
I'm not afraid to die. What I'm afraid of is having reality get the better of me, of having reality leave me behind.
From 1Q84
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XXX
Topic: Death
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.
From Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman
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XXX
Topic: Death
Dying is the only way/ For you to float free: / Nomonhan
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XXX
Topic: Death
In traveling, a companion, in life, compassion,'" she repeats, making sure of it. If she had paper and pencil, it wouldn't surprise me if she wrote it down. "So what does that really mean? In simple terms."
I think it over. It takes me a while to gather my thoughts, but she waits patiently.
"I think it means," I say, "that chance encounters are what keep us going. In simple terms.
From Kafka on the Shore
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XXX
Topic: Inspirational, Motivational
As I run I tell myself to think of a river. And clouds. But essentially I'm not thinking of a thing. All I do is keep on running in my own cozy, homemade void, my own nostalgic silence. And this is a pretty wonderful thing. No matter what anybody else says.
From What I Talk About When I Talk About Running
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XXX
Topic: Sports
I do feel that I’ve managed to make something I could maybe call my world…over time…little by little. And when I’m inside it, to some extent, I feel kind of relieved. But the very fact I felt I had to make such a world probably means that I’m a weak person, that I bruise easily, don’t you think? And in the eyes of society at large, that world of mine is a puny little thing. It’s like a cardboard house: a puff of wind might carry it off somewhere.
From After Dark
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XXX
Topic: Philosophical
I have a million things to talk to you about. All I want in this world is you. I want to see you and talk. I want the two of us to begin everything from the beginning.
From Norwegian Wood
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XXX
Topic: Happiness
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.
From Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World
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XXX
Topic: Happiness
Even chance meetings are the result of karma… Things in life are fated by our previous lives. That even in the smallest events there’s no such thing as coincidence.
From Kafka on the Shore
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XXX
Topic: Life
Some things in life are too complicated to explain in any language.
From Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage
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XXX
Topic: Life
I dream. Sometimes I think that’s the only right thing to do.
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XXX
Topic: Philosophical
Latter-day capitalism. Like it or not, it's the society we live in. Even the standard of right and wrong has been subdivided, made sophisticated. Within good, there's fashionable good and unfashionable good, and ditto for bad. Within fashionable good, there's formal and then there's casual; there's hip, there's cool, there's trendy, there's snobbish. Mix 'n' match. Like pulling on a Missoni sweater over Trussardi slacks and Pollini shoes, you can now enjoy hybrid styles of morality. It's the way of the world -- philosophy starting to look more and more like business administration.
From Dance Dance Dance
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XXX
Topic: Philosophical
Don't blame me. That's evolution. Evolution's always hard. Hard and bleak. No such thing as happy evolution.
From Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
XXX
Topic: Happiness
Wherever there's hope there's a trial.
From 1Q84
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XXX
Topic: Hope
Here's what I think, Mr. Wind-Up Bird," said May Kasahara. "Everybody's born with some different thing at the core of their existence. And that thing, whatever it is, becomes like a heat source that runs each person from the inside. I have one too, of course. Like everybody else. But sometimes it gets out of hand. It swells or shrinks inside me, and it shakes me up. What I'd really like to do is find a way to communicate that feeling to another person. But I can't seem to do it. They just don't get it. Of course, the problem could be that I'm not explaining it very well, but I think it's because they're not listening very well. They pretend to be listening, but they're not, really. So I get worked up sometimes, and I do some crazy things.
From The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle
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XXX
Topic: Life
Because memory and sensations are so uncertain, so biased, we always rely on a certain reality-call it an alternate reality-to prove the reality of events. To what extent facts we recognize as such really are as they seem, and to what extent these are facts merely because we label them as such, is an impossible distinction to draw. Therefore, in order to pin down reality as reality, we need another reality to relativize the first. Yet that other reality requires a third reality to serve as its grounding. An endless chain is created within our consciousness, and it is the very maintenance of this chain that produces the sensation that we are actually here, that we ourselves exist.
From South of the Border, West of the Sun
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
XXX
Topic: Life
People soon get tired of things that aren't boring, but not of what is boring.
From Kafka on the Shore
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
XXX
Topic: Life
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.
From Norwegian Wood
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
XXX
Topic: Death
Death leaves cans of shaving cream half-used.
From Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
XXX
Topic: Death
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.
From The Elephant Vanishes
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
XXX
Topic: Death
Time weighs down on you like an old, ambiguous dream. You keep on moving, trying to sleep through it. But even if you go to the ends of the earth, you won't be able to escape it. Still, you have to go there- to the edge of the world. There's something you can't do unless you get there.
From Kafka on the Shore
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
XXX
Topic: Inspirational
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.
From 1Q84
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
XXX
Topic: Hope
Most things are forgotten over time. Even the war itself, the life-and-death struggle people went through is now like something from the distant past. We’re so caught up in our everyday lives that events of the past are no longer in orbit around our minds. There are just too many things we have to think about everyday, too many new things we have to learn. But still, no matter how much time passes, no matter what takes place in the interim, there are some things we can never assign to oblivion, memories we can never rub away. They remain with us forever, like a touchstone.
From Kafka on the Shore
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
XXX
Topic: Life
Nobody's going to win all the time. On the highway of life you can't always be in the fast lane.
From What I Talk About When I Talk About Running
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
XXX
Topic: Life
I'm not afraid to die. What I'm afraid of is having reality get the better of me, of having reality leave me behind.
From 1Q84
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
XXX
Topic: Death
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.
From Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
XXX
Topic: Death
Dying is the only way/ For you to float free: / Nomonhan
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
XXX
Topic: Death
In traveling, a companion, in life, compassion,'" she repeats, making sure of it. If she had paper and pencil, it wouldn't surprise me if she wrote it down. "So what does that really mean? In simple terms."
I think it over. It takes me a while to gather my thoughts, but she waits patiently.
"I think it means," I say, "that chance encounters are what keep us going. In simple terms.
From Kafka on the Shore
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
XXX
Topic: Inspirational, Motivational
As I run I tell myself to think of a river. And clouds. But essentially I'm not thinking of a thing. All I do is keep on running in my own cozy, homemade void, my own nostalgic silence. And this is a pretty wonderful thing. No matter what anybody else says.
From What I Talk About When I Talk About Running
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
XXX
Topic: Sports
I do feel that I’ve managed to make something I could maybe call my world…over time…little by little. And when I’m inside it, to some extent, I feel kind of relieved. But the very fact I felt I had to make such a world probably means that I’m a weak person, that I bruise easily, don’t you think? And in the eyes of society at large, that world of mine is a puny little thing. It’s like a cardboard house: a puff of wind might carry it off somewhere.
From After Dark
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
XXX
Topic: Philosophical
I have a million things to talk to you about. All I want in this world is you. I want to see you and talk. I want the two of us to begin everything from the beginning.
From Norwegian Wood
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
XXX
Topic: Happiness
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.
From Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
XXX
Topic: Happiness
Even chance meetings are the result of karma… Things in life are fated by our previous lives. That even in the smallest events there’s no such thing as coincidence.
From Kafka on the Shore
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
XXX
Topic: Life
Some things in life are too complicated to explain in any language.
From Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
XXX
Topic: Life
I dream. Sometimes I think that’s the only right thing to do.
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
XXX
Topic: Philosophical
Latter-day capitalism. Like it or not, it's the society we live in. Even the standard of right and wrong has been subdivided, made sophisticated. Within good, there's fashionable good and unfashionable good, and ditto for bad. Within fashionable good, there's formal and then there's casual; there's hip, there's cool, there's trendy, there's snobbish. Mix 'n' match. Like pulling on a Missoni sweater over Trussardi slacks and Pollini shoes, you can now enjoy hybrid styles of morality. It's the way of the world -- philosophy starting to look more and more like business administration.
From Dance Dance Dance
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
XXX
Topic: Philosophical
Don't blame me. That's evolution. Evolution's always hard. Hard and bleak. No such thing as happy evolution.
From Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
XXX
Topic: Happiness
Wherever there's hope there's a trial.
From 1Q84
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
XXX
Topic: Hope
Here's what I think, Mr. Wind-Up Bird," said May Kasahara. "Everybody's born with some different thing at the core of their existence. And that thing, whatever it is, becomes like a heat source that runs each person from the inside. I have one too, of course. Like everybody else. But sometimes it gets out of hand. It swells or shrinks inside me, and it shakes me up. What I'd really like to do is find a way to communicate that feeling to another person. But I can't seem to do it. They just don't get it. Of course, the problem could be that I'm not explaining it very well, but I think it's because they're not listening very well. They pretend to be listening, but they're not, really. So I get worked up sometimes, and I do some crazy things.
From The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
XXX
Topic: Life
Because memory and sensations are so uncertain, so biased, we always rely on a certain reality-call it an alternate reality-to prove the reality of events. To what extent facts we recognize as such really are as they seem, and to what extent these are facts merely because we label them as such, is an impossible distinction to draw. Therefore, in order to pin down reality as reality, we need another reality to relativize the first. Yet that other reality requires a third reality to serve as its grounding. An endless chain is created within our consciousness, and it is the very maintenance of this chain that produces the sensation that we are actually here, that we ourselves exist.
From South of the Border, West of the Sun
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
XXX
Topic: Life
People soon get tired of things that aren't boring, but not of what is boring.
From Kafka on the Shore
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
XXX
Topic: Life
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.
From Norwegian Wood
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
XXX
Topic: Death
Death leaves cans of shaving cream half-used.
From Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
XXX
Topic: Death
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.
From The Elephant Vanishes
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
XXX
Topic: Death
Time weighs down on you like an old, ambiguous dream. You keep on moving, trying to sleep through it. But even if you go to the ends of the earth, you won't be able to escape it. Still, you have to go there- to the edge of the world. There's something you can't do unless you get there.
From Kafka on the Shore
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
XXX
Topic: Inspirational
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.
From 1Q84
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
XXX
Topic: Hope
Most things are forgotten over time. Even the war itself, the life-and-death struggle people went through is now like something from the distant past. We’re so caught up in our everyday lives that events of the past are no longer in orbit around our minds. There are just too many things we have to think about everyday, too many new things we have to learn. But still, no matter how much time passes, no matter what takes place in the interim, there are some things we can never assign to oblivion, memories we can never rub away. They remain with us forever, like a touchstone.
From Kafka on the Shore
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
XXX
Topic: Life
Nobody's going to win all the time. On the highway of life you can't always be in the fast lane.
From What I Talk About When I Talk About Running
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
XXX
Topic: Life
I'm not afraid to die. What I'm afraid of is having reality get the better of me, of having reality leave me behind.
From 1Q84
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
XXX
Topic: Death
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.
From Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
XXX
Topic: Death
Dying is the only way/ For you to float free: / Nomonhan
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
XXX
Topic: Death
In traveling, a companion, in life, compassion,'" she repeats, making sure of it. If she had paper and pencil, it wouldn't surprise me if she wrote it down. "So what does that really mean? In simple terms."
I think it over. It takes me a while to gather my thoughts, but she waits patiently.
"I think it means," I say, "that chance encounters are what keep us going. In simple terms.
From Kafka on the Shore
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
XXX
Topic: Inspirational, Motivational
As I run I tell myself to think of a river. And clouds. But essentially I'm not thinking of a thing. All I do is keep on running in my own cozy, homemade void, my own nostalgic silence. And this is a pretty wonderful thing. No matter what anybody else says.
From What I Talk About When I Talk About Running
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
XXX
Topic: Sports
I do feel that I’ve managed to make something I could maybe call my world…over time…little by little. And when I’m inside it, to some extent, I feel kind of relieved. But the very fact I felt I had to make such a world probably means that I’m a weak person, that I bruise easily, don’t you think? And in the eyes of society at large, that world of mine is a puny little thing. It’s like a cardboard house: a puff of wind might carry it off somewhere.
From After Dark
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
XXX
Topic: Philosophical
I have a million things to talk to you about. All I want in this world is you. I want to see you and talk. I want the two of us to begin everything from the beginning.
From Norwegian Wood
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
XXX
Topic: Happiness
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.
From Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
XXX
Topic: Happiness
Even chance meetings are the result of karma… Things in life are fated by our previous lives. That even in the smallest events there’s no such thing as coincidence.
From Kafka on the Shore
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
XXX
Topic: Life
Some things in life are too complicated to explain in any language.
From Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
XXX
Topic: Life
I dream. Sometimes I think that’s the only right thing to do.
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
XXX
Topic: Philosophical
Latter-day capitalism. Like it or not, it's the society we live in. Even the standard of right and wrong has been subdivided, made sophisticated. Within good, there's fashionable good and unfashionable good, and ditto for bad. Within fashionable good, there's formal and then there's casual; there's hip, there's cool, there's trendy, there's snobbish. Mix 'n' match. Like pulling on a Missoni sweater over Trussardi slacks and Pollini shoes, you can now enjoy hybrid styles of morality. It's the way of the world -- philosophy starting to look more and more like business administration.
From Dance Dance Dance
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
XXX
Topic: Philosophical
Don't blame me. That's evolution. Evolution's always hard. Hard and bleak. No such thing as happy evolution.
From Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
XXX
Topic: Happiness
Wherever there's hope there's a trial.
From 1Q84
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
XXX
Topic: Hope
Here's what I think, Mr. Wind-Up Bird," said May Kasahara. "Everybody's born with some different thing at the core of their existence. And that thing, whatever it is, becomes like a heat source that runs each person from the inside. I have one too, of course. Like everybody else. But sometimes it gets out of hand. It swells or shrinks inside me, and it shakes me up. What I'd really like to do is find a way to communicate that feeling to another person. But I can't seem to do it. They just don't get it. Of course, the problem could be that I'm not explaining it very well, but I think it's because they're not listening very well. They pretend to be listening, but they're not, really. So I get worked up sometimes, and I do some crazy things.
From The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
XXX
Topic: Life
Because memory and sensations are so uncertain, so biased, we always rely on a certain reality-call it an alternate reality-to prove the reality of events. To what extent facts we recognize as such really are as they seem, and to what extent these are facts merely because we label them as such, is an impossible distinction to draw. Therefore, in order to pin down reality as reality, we need another reality to relativize the first. Yet that other reality requires a third reality to serve as its grounding. An endless chain is created within our consciousness, and it is the very maintenance of this chain that produces the sensation that we are actually here, that we ourselves exist.
From South of the Border, West of the Sun
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
XXX
Topic: Life
People soon get tired of things that aren't boring, but not of what is boring.
From Kafka on the Shore
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
XXX
Topic: Life
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