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Have books ‘happened’ to you? Unless your answer to that question is ‘yes,’ I’m unsure how to talk to you

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
Answers
Books
Happened
Talk
Book
Unsure
Answer
Unless
Question

More quotes by Haruki Murakami

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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.
Haruki Murakami
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I’m free, I think. I shut my eyes and think hard and deep about how free I am, but I can’t really understand what it means. All I know is I’m totally alone. All alone in an unfamiliar place, like some solitary explorer who’s lost his compass and his map. Is this what it means to be free? I don’t know, and I give up thinking about it.
Haruki Murakami
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Nothing in the real world is as beautiful as the illusions of a person about to lose consciousness.
Haruki Murakami
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Cell phones are so convenient that they're an inconvenience.
Haruki Murakami
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So this was how secrets got started, I thought to myself. People constructed them little by little.
Haruki Murakami
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Time, of course, topples everyone in its path equally- the way that driver beats his old horse until it dies. But the thrashing we receive is one of frightful gentleness. Few of us even realize that we are being beaten.
Haruki Murakami
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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.
Haruki Murakami
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To know one’s own state is not a simple matter. One cannot look directly at one’s own face with one’s own eyes, for example. One has no choice but to look at one’s reflection in the mirror. Through experience, we come to believe that the image is correct, but that is all.
Haruki Murakami
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Understanding' is merely the sum total of our misunderstandings.
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.
Haruki Murakami
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Painful is the stress when one cannot reproduce or convey vividly to others, however hard he tries, what he's experienced so intensely.
Haruki Murakami
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Confidence as a teenager? Because I knew what I loved. I loved to read I loved to listen to music and I love cats. Those three things. So, even though I was an only kid, I could be happy because I knew what I loved.
Haruki Murakami
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There had to be something wrong with my life. I should have been born a Yugoslavian shepherd who looked up at the Big Dipper every night.
Haruki Murakami
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There has to be pain. That's the rule.
Haruki Murakami
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Fairness is a concept that holds only in limited situations. Yet we want the concept to extend to everything, in and out of phase. From snails to hardware stores to married life. Maybe no one finds it, or even misses it, but fairness is like love. What is given has nothing to do with what we seek.
Haruki Murakami
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Rousseau defined civilizations as when people build fences.
Haruki Murakami
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This was never any place I was meant to be. This isn’t a place for me.
Haruki Murakami
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I happen to like the strange ones. People who look normal and leads normal lives - they're the ones you have to watch out for.
Haruki Murakami
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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, 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.
Haruki Murakami
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Nothing so consumes a person as meaningless exertion
Haruki Murakami