Haruki Murakami Quotes (1949-)

“The sky grew darker, painted blue on blue, one stroke at a time, into deeper and deeper shades of night.”

“ The basic stupidity of modern Japan is that we’ve learned absolutely nothing from our contact with other Asian peoples.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Her long hair is loosely tied back, her face very refined and intelligent-looking, with beautiful eyes and a shadowy smile playing over her lips, a smile whose sense of completeness is indescribable.”

“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.”

“The novelist Haruki Murakami wrote in his Kafka on the Shore, "And once the storm is over you won't remember how you made it through, how you managed to survive. You won't even be sure, in fact, whether the storm is really over. But one thing is certain. When you come out of the storm you won't be the same person who walked in. That's what this storm's all about." This is the experience of transformation that Terry Tempest Williams wrote about.”