Quote

Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional. Say you’re running and you think, ‘Man, this hurts, I can’t take it anymore. The ‘hurt’ part is an unavoidable reality, but whether or not you can stand anymore is up to the runner himself.

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
Reality
Inevitable
Part
Anymore
Take
Stand
Men
Hurt
Unavoidable
Think
Suffering
Optional
Thinking
Whether
Runner
Pain
Runners
Running
Hurts

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They were each like a mirror for the other, reflecting the changes in themselves.
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My very existence, my life in the world, seemed like a hallucination. A strong wind would make me think my body was about to be blown to the end of the earth, to some land I had never seen or heard of, where my mind and body would separate forever. “Hold tight,” I would tell myself, but there was nothing for me to hold on to.
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My imagination is a kind of animal. So what I do is keep it alive.
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The better you were able to imagine what you wanted to imagine, the farther you could flee from reality.
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ice contains no future , just the past, sealed away. As if they're alive, everything in the world is sealed up inside, clear and distinct. Ice can preserve all kinds of things that way- cleanly, clearly. That's the essence of ice, the role it plays.
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The facts and techniques or whatever they teach you in class isn't going to be veryuseful in the real world, that's for sure.
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Memories warm you up from the inside. But they also tear you apart.
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It's all matter of attitude. You could let a lot of things bother you if you wanted to But it's pretty much the same anywhere you go, you can manage.
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Beyond the window, some kind of small, black thing shot across the sky. A bird, possibly. Or it might have been someone's soul being blown to the far side of the world.
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You know, eating's much more important than most people think. There comes a time in your life when you've just got to have something super-delicious. And when you're standing at that crossroads your whole life can change, depending on which one you go into - the good restaurant or the awful one.
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He felt as if his heart had dried up. I needed her he thought. I needed someone like her to fill the void inside me. But I wasn’t able to fill the void inside her. Until the bitter end, the emptiness inside her was hers alone.
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Mediocrity's like a spot on a shirt—it never comes off.
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Whenever I look at the ocean, I always want to talk to people, but when I'm talking to people, I always want to look at the ocean.
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How much do you love me?' Midori asked. 'Enough to melt all the tigers in the world to butter,' I said.
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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.
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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.
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I was thirty-seven then, strapped in my seat as the huge 747 plunged through dense cloud cover on approach to the Hamburg airport.
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In Japan they prefer the realistic style. They like answers and conclusions, but my stories have none. I want to leave them wide open to every possibility. I think my readers understand that openness.
Haruki Murakami
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Most human activities are predicated on the assumption that life goes on. If you take that premise away, what is there left?
Haruki Murakami