Haruki Murakami - Kafka on the Shore (2002)

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The Earth, time, concepts, love, life, faith justice, evil - they're all fluid and in transition. They don't stay in one form or in one place forever. The whole universe is like some big FedEx box.

Haruki Murakami
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
The sense of tragedy - according to Aristotle - comes, ironically enough, not from the protagonist's weak points but from his good qualities. Do you know what I'm getting at? People are drawn deeper into tragedy not by their defects but by their virtues.... [But] we accept irony through a device called metaphor. And through that we grow and become deeper human beings.

Haruki Murakami
Gays, lesbians, straights, feminists, fascist pigs, communists, Hare Krishnas - none of them bother me. I don't care what banner they raise. But what I can't stand are hollow people. When I'm with them I just can't bare it, and wind up saying things I shouldn't.

Haruki Murakami
A deserted library in the morning - there's something about it that really gets to me. All possible words and ideas are there, resting peacefully.

Haruki Murakami
Symbolism and meaning are two separate things. I think she found the right words by bypassing procedures like meaning and logic. She captured words in a dream, like delicately catching hold of a butterfly's wings as it flutters around. Artists are those who can evade the verbose.

Haruki Murakami
I stare at this ceaseless, rushing crowd and imagine a time a hundred years from now. In a hundred years everybody here-me included-will have disappeared from the face of the earth and turned into ashes or dust. A weird thought, but everything in front of me starts to seem unreal, like a gust of wind could blow it all away.

Haruki Murakami
What I think is this: You should give up looking for lost cats and start searching for the other half of your shadow.

Haruki Murakami
When I first met you, I felt a kind of contradiction in you. You're seeking something, but at the same time, you are running away for all you're worth.

Haruki Murakami
Anyone who falls in love is searching for missing pieces of themselves. So anyone who's in love gets sad when they think of their lover. It's like stepping back inside a room you have fond memories of, one you haven't seen in a long time. It's just a natural feeling. You're not the person who discovered that feeling, so don't go trying to patent it, okay?

Haruki Murakami
The most dangerous creature here would have to be me. So maybe I'm just scared of my own shadow.

Haruki Murakami
Perhaps most people in the world aren't trying to be free, Kafka. They just think they are. It's all an illusion. If they really were set free, most people would be in a real pickle. You'd better remember that. People actually prefer not being free?

Haruki Murakami
A certain type of perfection can only be realized through a limitless accumulation of the imperfect.

Haruki Murakami
The pure present is an ungraspable advance of the past devouring the future. In truth, all sensation is already memory.

Haruki Murakami
You've already decided what you're going to do, and all that's left is to set the wheels in motion. I mean, it's your life. Basically, you gotta go with what you think is right.

Haruki Murakami
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.

Haruki Murakami
When someone is trying very hard to get something, they don't. And when they're running away from something as hard as they can, it usually catches up with them.

Haruki Murakami
In everybody's life there's a point of no return. And in a very few cases, a point where you can't go forward anymore. And when we reach that point, all we can do is quietly accept the fact. That's how we survive.

Haruki Murakami
Your heart is like a great river after a long spell of rain, spilling over its banks. All signposts that once stood on the ground are gone, inundated and carried away by that rush of water. And still the rain beats down on the surface of the river. Every time you see a flood like that on the news you tell yourself: That's it. That's my heart.

Haruki Murakami
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
The library was like a second home. Or maybe more like a real home, more than the place I lived in. By going every day I got to know all the lady librarians who worked there. They knew my name and always said hi. I was painfully shy, though, and could barely reply.

Haruki Murakami
If you think God's there, He is. If you don't, He isn't. And if that's what God's like, I wouldn't worry about it.

Haruki Murakami
Beyond the edge of the world there's a space where emptiness and substance neatly overlap, where past and future form a continuous, endless loop. And, hovering about, there are signs no one has ever read, chords no one has ever heard.

Haruki Murakami
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.

Haruki Murakami
Time passes slowly. Nobody says a word, everyone lost in quiet reading. One person sits at a desk jotting down notes, but the rest are sitting there silently, not moving, totally absorbed. Just like me.

Haruki Murakami
In traveling, a companion, in life, compassion,'" she repeats, making sure of it. If she had paper and pencil, it wouldn't surprise me if she wrote it down. "So what does that really mean? In simple terms." I think it over. It takes me a while to gather my thoughts, but she waits patiently. "I think it means," I say, "that chance encounters are what keep us going. In simple terms.

Haruki Murakami
I don't know, I don't feel right unless I've got the sea and mountains nearby. People are mostly a product of where they were born and raised. How you think and feel's always linked to the lay of the land, the temperature. The prevailing winds, even.

Haruki Murakami
It's hard to tell the difference between sea and sky, between voyager and sea. Between reality and the workings of the heart.

Haruki Murakami
As long as there's such a thing as time, everybody's damaged in the end, changed into something else. It always happens, sooner or later.

Haruki Murakami
The silence grew deeper, so deep that if you listened carefully you might very well catch the sound of the earth revolving on its axis.

Haruki Murakami