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Strong and independent? I’m neither. I’m just being pushed along by reality, whether I like it or not.

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
Pushed
Neither
Independent
Along
Whether
Strong
Reality
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More quotes by Haruki Murakami

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What would tomorrow bring? I wondered. Both hands on the wheel, I closed my eyes. I didn’t feel like I was in my own body my body was just a lonely, temporary container I happened to be borrowing. What would become of me tomorrow I did not know.
Haruki Murakami
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I started writing at the kitchen table after midnight. It took ten months to finish that first book I sent it to a publisher and I got some kind of prize, so it was like a dream - I was surprised to find it happening.
Haruki Murakami
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Letters are just pieces of paper, I said. Burn them, and what stays in your heart will stay keep them, and what vanishes will vanish.
Haruki Murakami
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You have to make an effort to always look at the good side, always think about the good things. Then you've got nothing to be afraid of. If something bad comes up, you do more thinking at that point.
Haruki Murakami
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Silence. How long it lasted, I couldn't tell. It might have been five seconds, it might have been a minute. Time wasn't fixed. It wavered, stretched, shrank. Or was it me that wavered, stretched, and shrank in the silence? I was warped in the folds of time, like a reflection in a fun house mirror.
Haruki Murakami
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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.
Haruki Murakami
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Music always stimulates my imagination. When I'm writing I usually have some Baroque music on low in the background chamber music by Bach, Telemann, and the like.
Haruki Murakami
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When I was fifteen, all I wanted was to go off to some other world, a place beyond anybody’s reach. A place beyond the flow of time.” - But there’s no place like that in this world. - Exactly. Which is why I’m living here, in this world where things are continually damaged, where the heart is fickle, where time flows past without a break.
Haruki Murakami
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It's true though: time moves in its own special way in the middle of the night, the bartender says, loudly striking a book match and lighting a cigarette. You can't fight it.
Haruki Murakami
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If you miss the bus, miss the train, you’d be left behind. So everyone says, let’s get on the train, let’s get on the bus and go faster and get rich... I just didn’t like that kind of lifestyle. I love to read books, to listen to music.
Haruki Murakami
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I guess I felt attached to my weakness. My pain and suffering too. Summer light, the smell of a breeze, the sound of cicadas - if I like these things, why should I apologize?
Haruki Murakami
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Sometimes when I'm with you, I remember things I lost when I was your age. Like I remember the sound of the rain and the smell of the wind.
Haruki Murakami
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Nature is actually unnatural
Haruki Murakami
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Animals that not only move by their own free will and share feelings with people but also possess sight and hearing qualify as deserving of names.
Haruki Murakami
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I want to write about people who dream and wait for the night to end, who long for the light so they can hold the ones they love.
Haruki Murakami
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She was truly a beautiful girl. I could feel a small polished stone sinking through the darkest waters of my heart. All those deep convoluted channels and passageways, and yet she managed to toss her pebble right down to the bottom of it all.
Haruki Murakami
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For some reason all the middle-aged women he knew were very efficient.
Haruki Murakami
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Sometimes when I look at you, I feel I'm gazing at a distant star. It's dazzling, but the light is from tens of thousands of years ago. Maybe the star doesn't even exist any more. Yet sometimes that light seems more real to me than anything.
Haruki Murakami
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I just gave them a little scare. A touch of psychological terror. As Joseph Conrad once wrote, true terror is the kind that men feel towards their imagination. (from Super-frog Saves Tokyo)
Haruki Murakami
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Like most novelists, I like to do exactly the opposite of what I'm told. It's in my nature as a novelist. Novelists can't trust anything they haven't seen with their own eyes or touched with their own hands.
Haruki Murakami