Quote

It's a dark, cool, quiet place. A basement in your soul. And that place can sometimes be dangerous to the human mind. I can open the door and enter that darkness, but I have to be very careful. I can find my story there. Then I bring that thing to the surface, into the real world.

Haruki Murakami

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Haruki Murakami
Age: 75
Born: 1949
Born: January 12
Athletics Competitor
Essayist
Linguist
Novelist
Prosaist
Science Fiction Writer
Translator
University Teacher
Writer
Kyōto
Murakami Haruki
Humans
Open
Careful
Sometimes
Dark
Cool
Real
Story
Door
Thing
Place
Quiet
Mind
Stories
Darkness
Basement
World
Soul
Doors
Basements
Find
Dangerous
Enter
Human
Bring
Surface

More quotes by 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.
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Dreaming is the day job of novelists, but sharing our dreams is a still more important task for us. We cannot be novelists without this sense of sharing something.
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Most runners run not because they want to live longer, but because they want to live life to the fullest.
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What's nurtured slowly grows well.
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Such wounds to the heart will probably never heal. But we cannot simply sit and stare at our wounds forever.
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It's true that at the time I was fond of Kurt Vonnegut and Richard Brautigan, and it was from them that I learned about this kind of simple, swift-paced style, but the main reason for the style of my first novel is that I simply did not have the time to write sustained prose.
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So what’s wrong if there happens to be one guy in the world who enjoys trying to understand you?
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That’s how stories happen — with a turning point, an unexpected twist. There’s only one kind of happiness, but misfortune comes in all shapes and sizes. It’s like Tolstoy said. Happiness is an allegory, unhappiness a story.
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It's like the Tibetan Wheel of the Passions. As the wheel turns, the values and feelings on the outer rim rise and fall, shining or sinking into darkness. But true love stays fastened to the axle and doesn't move.
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With luck, it might even snow for us.
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A person's last moments are an important thing. You can't choose how you're born but you can choose how you die.
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Something inside me had dropped away, and nothing came in to fill the cavern.
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My point is: in this whole wide world the only person you can depend on is you.
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I go back to the reading room, where I sink down in the sofa and into the world of The Arabian Nights. Slowly, like a movie fadeout, the real world evaporates. I'm alone, inside the world of the story. My favourite feeling in the world.
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I may not be the most likable person in the world, but I try not to upset people.
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Nothing so consumes a person as meaningless exertion
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Our responsibility begins with our imagination.
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The rain that fell on the city runs down the dark gutters and empties into the sea without even soaking the ground
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