Haruki Murakami - Norwegian Wood (1987)

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Something inside me had dropped away, and nothing came in to fill the cavern.

Haruki Murakami
Life is here, death is over there. I am here, not over there.

Haruki Murakami
Don't let thoughts of me hold you back. Just do what you want to do. Otherwise, I might end up taking you with me, and that is the one thing I don't want to do. I don't want to interfere with your life.

Haruki Murakami
I probably still haven't completely adapted to the world. I don't know, I feel like this isn't the real world. The people, the scene: they just don't seem real to me.

Haruki Murakami
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
I can be hurt, you know. I can get as exhausted as anybody else. I can feel so bad I want to cry, too.

Haruki Murakami
Where I went in my travels, it's impossible for me to recall. I remember the sights and sounds and smells clearly enough, but the names of the towns are gone, as well as any sense of the order in which I traveled from place to place.

Haruki Murakami
Waiting for your answer is one of the most painful things I have ever been through. At least let me know whether or not I hurt you.

Haruki Murakami
With the advent of winter, her eyes seemed to take on a greater transparency, a transparency that lead nowhere. Occassionally, for no particular reason, Naoko would gaze into my eyes as if searching for something. Each time I was filled with odd sensations of lonliness and inadequecy.

Haruki Murakami
Better to be a first-class matchbox than a second-class match.

Haruki Murakami
I am a flawed human being - a far more flawed human being than you realize.

Haruki Murakami
But who can say what's best? That's why you need to grab whatever chance you have of happiness where you find it, and not worry about other people too much. My experience tells me that we get no more than two or three such chances in a life time, and if we let them go, we regret it for the rest of our lives.

Haruki Murakami
You don't get it, do you?" I said. It's not a question of 'what then'. Some people get a kick out of reading railroad timetables and that's all they do all day. Some people make huge model boats out of matchsticks. So what's wrong if there happens to be one guy in the world who enjoys trying to understand you?

Haruki Murakami
Don't you think it would be wonderful to get rid of everything and everybody and just go some place where you don't know a soul?

Haruki Murakami
My heart would swell without warning, and tremble, and lurch with a stab of pain. I would try clamping my eyes shut and gritting my teeth, and waiting for it to pass. And it would pass — but slowly, taking its own time, and leaving a dull ache behind.

Haruki Murakami
Of course life frightens me sometimes. I don't happen to take that as the premise for everything else though. I'm going to give it hundred percent and go as far as I can. I'll take what I want and leave what I don't want. That's how I intend to live my life, and it things go bad, I'll stop and reconsider at that point. If you think about it, an unfair society is a society that makes it possible for you to exploit your abilities to the limit.

Haruki Murakami
Those were strange days, now that I look back at them. In the midst of life, everything revolved around death.

Haruki Murakami
She was a keen observer, a precise user of language, sharp-tongued and funny. She could stir your emotions. Yes, really, that's what she was so good at - stirring people's emotions, moving you. And she knew she had this power...I only realized later. At the time, I had no idea what she was doing to me.

Haruki Murakami
Despite your best efforts, people are going to be hurt when it's time for them to be hurt.

Haruki Murakami
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
What happens when people open their hearts?"... "They get better.

Haruki Murakami
If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking.

Haruki Murakami
How wonderful it is to be able to write someone a letter! To feel like conveying your thoughts to a person, to sit at your desk and pick up a pen, to put your thoughts into words like this is truly marvelous.

Haruki Murakami
Wasn't he the one who said you shouldn't trust anybody who calls himself an ordinar man? - Naoko

Haruki Murakami
I wondered if she was trying to convey something to me, something she could not put into words - something prior to words that she could not grasp within herself and which therefore had no hope of ever turning into words.

Haruki Murakami