About Harukie MurakamiHaruki Murakami is a popular contemporary Japanese writer and translator. He was born in January 12, 1949 in Kyoto, Japan. His work has been described by the Virginia Quarterly Review as "easily accessible, yet profoundly complex." Critics suggest his work draws from film noir and contains elements of magical realism. His work has been influenced by Raymond Carver, Kurt Vonnegut, Richard Brautigan, Raymond Chandler, Fyodor Dostoevsky and more...
Some of his popular quotes:
"If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking."
— from Norwegian Wood
"Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional."
— from What I Talk About When I Talk About Running
"But who can say what's best? That's why you need to grab whatever chance you have of happiness where you find it, and not worry about other people too much. My experience tells me that we get no more than two or three such chances in a life time, and if we let them go, we regret it for the rest of our lives."
—from Norwegian Wood
"I dream. Sometimes I think that's the only right thing to do."
— from Sputnik Sweetheart
"Sometimes when I look at you, I feel I'm gazing at a distant star.
It's dazzling, but the light is from tens of thousands of years ago.
Maybe the star doesn't even exist any more. Yet sometimes that light seems more real to me than anything."
— from South Of The Border, West Of The Sun
"Whatever it is you're seeking won't come in the form you're expecting."
— Haruki Murakami
"I have this strange feeling that I'm not myself anymore. It's hard to put into words, but I guess it's like I was fast asleep, and someone came, disassembled me, and hurriedly put me back together again. That sort of feeling."
— from Sputnik Sweetheart
"Don't you think it would be wonderful to get rid of everything and everybody and just go some place where you don't know a soul?"
— Haruki Murakami
"Chance encounters are what keep us going."
— from Kafka on the Shore
"In this world, there are things you can only do alone, and things you can only do with somebody else. It's important to combine the two in just the right amount."
— Haruki Murakami
"Narrow minds devoid of imagination. Intolerance, theories cut off from reality, empty terminology, usurped ideals, inflexible systems. Those are the things that really frighten me. What I absolutely fear and loathe."
— from Kafka on the Shore
"For both of us, it had simply been too enormous an experience. We shared it by not talking about it. Does this make any sense?"
— from The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle
"I realize full well how hard it must be to go on living alone in a place from which someone has left you, but there is nothing so cruel in this world as the desolation of having nothing to hope for."
— from The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle
"I was always hungry for love. Just once, I wanted to know what it was like to get my fill of it -- to be fed so much love I couldn't take any more. Just once. "
— from Norwegian Wood
"Of course it hurt that we could never love each other in a physical way. We would have been far more happy if we had. But that was like the tides, the change of seasons--something immutable, an immovable destiny we could never alter. No matter how cleverly we might shelter it, our delicate friendship wasn't going to last forever. We were bound to reach a dead end. That was painfully clear."
— from Sputnik Sweetheart
"A certain type of perfection can only be realized through a limitless accumulation of the imperfect."
— from Kafka on the Shore
"two people can sleep in the same bed and still be alone when they close their eyes"
— from Hard-boiled Wonderland and the End of the World
"These days I just can't seem to say what I mean [...]. I just can't. Every time I try to say something, it misses the point. Either that or I end up saying the opposite of what I mean. The more I try to get it right the more mixed up it gets. Sometimes I can't even remember what I was trying to say in the first place. It's like my body's split in two and one of me is chasing the other me around a big pillar. We're running circles around it. The other me has the right words, but I can never catch her."
— from Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman: 24 Stories
"If you're in pitch blackness, all you can do is sit tight until your eyes get used to the dark"
— Haruki Murakami
"Every one of us is losing something precious to us. Lost opportunities, lost possibilities, feelings we can never get back again. That’s part of what it means to be alive."
— from Kafka on the Shore
"In the world we live in, what we know and what we don't know are like Siamese twins, inseparable, existing in a state of confusion."
Citations:
Goodreads. Author Profile: Haruki Murakami. Web. 23 May 2011. <http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/3354.Haruki_Murakami>.
Goodreads. Quotes: Haruki Murakami. Web. 23 May 2011. <http://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/3354.Haruki_Murakami>.
Yellow Wood: Two roadss diverged in a Yellow wood, and I-. Image from Blog Article: Posted March 6, 2011 by <http://eldred55.wordpress.com/2011/03/06/haruki-murakami/>.
