Haruki Murakami, 1Q84 Quotes

I'm all alone, but I'm not lonely.

If you can love someone with your whole heart, even one person, then there's salvation in life. Even if you can't get together with that person.

Time flows in strange ways on Sundays, and sights become mysteriously distorted.

A person learns how to love himself through the simple acts of loving and being loved by someone else.

Life is not like water. Things in life don't necessarily flow over the shortest possible route.

I can bear any pain as long as it has meaning.

It is not that the meaning cannot be explained. But there are certain meanings that are lost forever the moment they are explained in words.

It's not me but the world that's deranged.

What I want is for the two of us to meet somewhere by chance one day, like, passing on the street, or getting on the same bus.

This is what it means to live on. When granted hope, a person uses it as fuel, as a guidepost to life. It is impossible to live without hope.

She lived frugally, but her meals were the only things on which she deliberately spent her money. She never compromised on the quality of her groceries, and drank only good-quality wines.

You can have tons of talent, but it won't necessarily keep you fed. If you have sharp instincts, through, you'll never go hungry.

Whenever she felt like crying, she would instead become angry—at someone else or at herself—which meant that it was rare for her to shed tears.

You like to write. It's the single most important quality for someone who wants to be a writer. But not in itself enough.

Loneliness becomes an acid that eats away at you.

There is nothing in this world that never takes a step outside a person's heart.

...most people in the world don't really use their brains to think. And people who don't think are the ones who don't listen to others.

It seemed to me that this world has a serious shortage of both logic and kindness.

A person's last moments are an important thing. You can't choose how you're born but you can choose how you die.

Wherever there's hope there's a trial.

Most of the psychological differences between men and women seem to come from differences in their reproductive system

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.

Good style happens in one of two ways: the writer either has an inborn talent or is willing to work herself to death to get it.

Hundreds of butterflies flitted in and out of sight like short-lived punctuation marks in a stream of consciousness without beginning or end.

It is very simple, actually. It is because you and Tengo were so powerfully drawn to each other.

For some reason all the middle-aged women he knew were very efficient.

In the name of God, they stole her time and her freedom, putting shackles on her heart. They preached about God's kindness, but preached twice as much about his wrath and intolerance.

Perhaps this was the wisdom with which a child in her position survived: by minimizing her wounds—staying as small as possible, as nearly transparent as possible.

Violence does not always take visible form, and not all wounds gush blood.

The conclusion of things is the good. The good is, in other words, the conclusion at which all things arrive. Let's leave doubt for tomorrow, " Komatsu said. "That is the point.

It was a stillness so profound one had to adjust one’s hearing to it.....The silence seemed to be trying to tell him something about itself.

But hell, you've gotta work with what you've got.

A person's last moments are an important thing. You can't choose how you're born, but you can choose how to die.

Once the ego is born into this world, it has to shoulder morality.

Each "way of thinking" has its own shape and color, which wax and wane like the moon.

When you prick a person with a needle, red blood comes out- that's the real world.

Only by learning the truth—whatever that truth might be—could people be given the right kind of power.

Its Barnum & Bailey world just as phony as it can be, But it would't be make-believe if you believed in me

If you can't understand it without an explanation, you can't understand it with an explanation.

To be a Russian writer at the end of the nineteenth century must have meant bearing an inescapably bitter fate. The more they tried to escape from Russia, the more deeply Russia swallowed them.

I don't have a thing, " Tengo said, "except my soul.""Sounds like a job for Mephistopheles, " she said.

But still, " Ayumi said, "it seems to me that this world has a serious shortage of both logic and kindness.""You may be right, " Aomame said, "But it's too late to trade it in for another one.

The role of a story was, in the broadest terms, to transpose a single problem into another form. ... It was like a piece of paper bearing the indecipherable text of a magic spell.

For a ten-year-old boy and a ten-year-old girl to become good friends was not easy under any circumstances. Indeed, it might be one of the most difficult accomplishments in the world.

Guns are like cars: you can trust a good used one better than one that's brand new.

Being alive, if you had to define it, meant emitting a variety of smells

But there are certain meanings that are lost forever the moment they are explained in words.

At some point the future becomes reality. And then it quickly becomes the past.

This may be the most important proposition revealed by history: 'At the time, no one knew what was coming.