Haruki Murakami - Norwegian Wood (1987)

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No truth can cure the sorrow we feel from losing a loved one. No truth, no sincerity, no strength, no kindness can cure that sorrow. All we can do is see it through to the end and learn something from it, but what we learn will be no help in facing the next sorrow that comes to us without warning.

Haruki Murakami
I was thirty-seven then, strapped in my seat as the huge 747 plunged through dense cloud cover on approach to the Hamburg airport.

Haruki Murakami
In his own way, he's lived life with all the intensity he could muster.

Haruki Murakami
Not that we were incompatible: we just had nothing to talk about.

Haruki Murakami
If you're in pitch blackness, all you can do is sit tight until your eyes get used to the dark.

Haruki Murakami
I don't want our relationship to end like this. You're one of the very few friends I have, and it hurts not being able to see you. When am I going to be able to talk to you? I want you to tell me that much, at least.

Haruki Murakami
Each day the sun would rise and set, the flag would be raised and lowered. Each Sunday I would have a date with my dead friend's girl. I had no idea what I was doing or what I was going to do.

Haruki Murakami
This is one more piece of advice I have for you: don't get impatient. Even if things are so tangled up you can't do anything, don't get desperate or blow a fuse and start yanking on one particular thread before it's ready to come undone. You have to realize it's going to be a long process and that you'll work on things slowly, one at a time.

Haruki Murakami
Loving another person is a wonderful thing, and if that love is sincere, no one ends up tossed into a labyrinth. You have to have more faith in yourself.

Haruki Murakami
It was as if I were writing letters to hold together the pieces of my crumbling life.

Haruki Murakami
If I have left a wound inside you, it is not just your wound but mine as well.

Haruki Murakami
I was always hungry for love. Just once, I wanted to know what it was like to get my fill of it — to be fed so much love I couldn't take any more. Just once.

Haruki Murakami
How many Sundays – how many hundreds of Sundays like this – lay ahead of me? Quiet, peaceful and lonely, I said aloud to myself. On Sundays i didn't wind my spring.

Haruki Murakami
The years nineteen and twenty are a crucial stage in the maturation of character, and if you allow yourself to become warped when you're that age, it will cause you pain when you're older.

Haruki Murakami
Hatsumi had a pretty good idea that Nagasawa was sleeping around, but she never complained to him. She was seriously in love with him, but she never made demands. 'I don't deserve a girl like Hatsumi,' Nagasawa once said to me. I had to agree with him.

Haruki Murakami
Why?" she screamed. "Are you crazy? You know the English subjunctive, you understand trigonometry, you can read Marx, and you don't know the answer to something as simple as that? Why do you even have to ask? Why do you have to make a girl SAY something like this? I like you more than I like him, that's all. I wish I had fallen in love with somebody a little more handsome, of course. But I didn't. I fell in love with you!

Haruki Murakami
It's basically impossible for everybody's justice to prevail or everybody's happiness to triumph, so chaos takes over.

Haruki Murakami
Things like that happen all the time in this great big world of ours. It's like taking a boat out on a beautiful lake on a beautiful day and thinking both the sky and the lake are beautiful. So stop eating yourself up alive. Things will go where they're supposed to go if you just let them take their natural course.

Haruki Murakami
I saw that she was crying. Before I knew it, I was kissing her. Others on the platform were staring at us, but I didn't care about such things anymore. We were alive, she and I. And all we had to think about was continuing to live.

Haruki Murakami
People leave strange little memories of themselves behind when they die.

Haruki Murakami
It's a quiet place, so people talk quietly," said Naoko. She made a neat pile of fish bones at the edge of her plate and dabbed at her mouth with a handkerchief. "There's no need to raise your voice here. You don't have to convince anybody of anything, and you don't have to attract anyone's attention.

Haruki Murakami
Let the wind change direction a little bit, and their cries turned to whispers.

Haruki Murakami
I didn't have much to say to anybody but kept to myself and my books. With my eyes closed, I would touch a familiar book and draw it's fragrance deep inside me. This was enough to make me happy.

Haruki Murakami
I would stare at the grains of light suspended in that silent space, struggling to see into my own heart. What did I want? And what did others want from me? But I could never find the answers. Sometimes I would reach out and try to grasp the grains of light, but my fingers touched nothing.

Haruki Murakami
What a terrible thing it is to wound someone you really care for and to do it so unconsciously.

Haruki Murakami
I read Naoko's letter again and again, and each time I read it I would be filled with the same unbearable sadness I used to feel whenever Naoko stared into my eyes. I had no way to deal with it, no place I could take it to or hide it away. Like the wind passing over my body, it had neither shape nor weight, nor could I wrap myself in it.

Haruki Murakami
Life doesn't require ideals. It requires standards of action.

Haruki Murakami
For a certain kind of person, love begins from something tiny or silly. From something like that or it doesn't begin at all.

Haruki Murakami
So I made up my mind I was going to find someone who would love me unconditionally three hundred and sixty-five days a year. Watanabe: Wow, and did your search pay off? M: That's the hard part. I guess I've been waiting so long I'm looking for perfection. That makes it tough.

Haruki Murakami
Nobody likes being alone that much. I don't go out of my way to make friends, that's all. It just leads to disappointment.

Haruki Murakami