"Far away, I could hear them lapping up my brains. Like Macbeth's witches, the three lithe cats surrounded my broken head, slurping up that thick soup inside. The tips of their rough tongues licked the soft folds of my mind. And with each lick my consciousness flickered like a flame and faded away."
— Haruki Murakami (Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman)

"Here's what I think, Mr. Wind-Up Bird," said May Kasahara. "Everybody's born with some different thing at the core of their existence. And that thing, whatever it is, becomes like a heat source that runs each person from the inside. I have one too, of course. Like everybody else. But sometimes it gets out of hand. It swells or shrinks inside me, and it shakes me up. What I'd really like to do is find a way to communicate that feeling to another person. But I can't seem to do it. They just don't get it. Of course, the problem could be that I'm not explaining it very well, but I think it's because they're not listening very well. They pretend to be listening, but they're not, really. So I get worked up sometimes, and I do some crazy things."
— Haruki Murakami (The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle)

"Eleven o'clock had come and gone. I had to find a way to bring this conversation to a successful conclusion and get out of there. But before I could say anything, she suddenly asked me to hold her.
'Why?' I asked, caught off guard.
'To charge my batteries,' she said.
'Charge your batteries?'
'My body has run out of electricity. I haven't been able to sleep for days now. The minute I get to sleep I wake up, and then I can't get back to sleep. I can't think. When I get like that, somebody has to charge my batteries. Otherwise, I can't go on living. It's true.'
I peered into her eyes, wondering if she was still drunk, but they were once again her usual cool, intelligent eyes. She was far from drunk."
— Haruki Murakami (The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle)

"I often recall these words when I am writing, and I think to myself, “It’s true. There aren’t any new words. Our job is to give new meanings and special overtones to absolutely ordinary words.” I find the thought reassuring. It means that vast, unknown stretches still lie before us, fertile territories just waiting for us to cultivate them."
— Haruki Murakami

"For a while" is a phrase whose length can't be measured.At least by the person who's waiting."
— Haruki Murakami (South of the Border, West of the Sun: A Novel)

"Time weighs down on you like an old, ambiguous dream. You keep on moving, trying to sleep through it. But even if you go to the ends of the earth, you won't be able to escape it. Still, you have to go there- to the edge of the world. There's something you can't do unless you get there."
— Haruki Murakami (Kafka on the Shore)

"Midori: 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 (Norwegian Wood)

"Korogi: So once you're dead there's just nothing?
Mari: Basically...
Korogi: I get so scared when I start thinking about this stuff. I can hardly breathe, and my whole body wants to shrink into a corner. It's so much easier to just believe in reincarnation."
— Haruki Murakami (After Dark)

"I have been told I've got a darkish personality. A few times."
Takahashi swings his trombone case from his right shoulder to his left. Then he says, "It's not as if our lives are divided simply into light and dark. There's shadowy middle ground. Recognizing and understanding the shadows is what a healthy intelligence does. And to acquire a healthy intelligence takes a certain amount of time and effort. I don't think you have a particularly dark character."
— Haruki Murakami (After Dark)

"Lots of different ways to live and lots of different ways to die. But in the end that doesn't make a bit of difference. All that remains is a desert."
— Haruki Murakami (South of the Border, West of the Sun)

"Of what value is a civilization that can't toast a piece of bread as ordered?"
— from Haruki Murakami's "After Dark"

"And you really will have to make it through that violent, metaphysical, symbolic storm. No matter how metaphysical or symbolic it might be, make no mistake about it: it will cut through flesh like a thousand razor blades. People will bleed there, and you will bleed too. Hot, red blood. You'll catch that blood in your hands, your own blood and the blood of others. 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, in fact, 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 (Kafka on the Shore)

"..And you know, this thought crossed my mind at the time: maybe chance is a pretty common thing after all. Those kinds of coincidences are happening all around us, all the time, but most of them don't attract our attention and we just let them go by. It's like fireworks in the daytime. You might hear a faint sound, but even if you look up at the sky you can't see a thing. But if we're really hoping something may come true it may become visible, like a message rising to the surface. Then we're able to make it out clearly, decipher what it means. And seeing it before us we're surprised and wonder at how strange things like this can happen. Even though there's nothing strange about it. ..."
— Haruki Murakami

"I often dream about the Dolphin Hotel."
— Haruki Murakami (Dance, Dance, Dance)

"It was a short one-paragraph item in the morning edition."
— Haruki Murakami (A Wild Sheep Chase)

"In the spring of her twenty-second year, Sumire fell in love for the first time in her life."
— Haruki Murakami (Sputnik Sweetheart)

"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 (Norwegian Wood)

"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 (The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle)

"That's why I like listening to Schubert while I'm driving. Like I said, it's because all his performances are imperfect. A dense, artistic kind of imperfection stimulates your consciousness, keeps you alert. If I listen to some utterly perfect performance of an utterly perfect piece while I'm driving, I might want to close my eyes and die right then and there. But listening to the D major, I can feel the limits of what humans are capable of - that a certain type of perfection can only be realized through a limitless accumulation of the imperfect. And personally I find that encouraging."
— Haruki Murakami (Kafka on the Shore)

"In a place far away from anyone or anywhere, I drifted off for a moment."
— Haruki Murakami (The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle)

"And it came to me then. That we were wonderful traveling companions but in the end no more than lonely lumps of metal in their own separate orbits. From far off they look like beautiful shooting stars, but in reality they're nothing more than prisons, where each of us is locked up alone, going nowhere. When the orbits of these two satellites of ours happened to cross paths, we could be together. Maybe even open our hearts to each other. But that was only for the briefest moment. In the next instant we'd be in absolute solitude. Until we burned up and became nothing."
— Haruki Murakami (Sputnik Sweetheart)

"The answer is dreams. Dreaming on and on. Entering the world of dreams and never coming out. Living in dreams for the rest of time."
— Haruki Murakami (Sputnik Sweetheart)

"Why do people have to be this lonely? What's the point of it all? Millions of people in this world, all of them yearning, looking to others to satisfy them, yet isolating themselves. Why? Was the earth put here just to nourish human loneliness?"
— Haruki Murakami (Sputnik Sweetheart)

"I dream. Sometimes I think that's the only right thing to do."
— Haruki Murakami (Sputnik Sweetheart)

"An empty shell. Those were the first words that sprang to mind. .... Something incredibly important - .. - had disappeared from Miu for good. Leaving behind not life, but its absence" - Sputnik Sweetheart"
— Haruki Murakami

"Was the earth put here just to nourish human loneliness?"
— Haruki Murakami (Sputnik Sweetheart)

"It was at that age
that poetry came in search of me"
— Pablo Neruda (Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair: Dual Language Edition)

"We the mortals touch the metals,
the wind, the ocean shores, the stones,
knowing they will go on, inert or burning,
and I was discovering, naming all the these things:
it was my destiny to love and say goodbye."
— Pablo Neruda (Still Another Day)

"XVI

Each intheh most hidden sack kept
the lost jewels of memory,
intense love, secret nights and permanent kisses,
the fragment of public or private happiness.
A few,the wolves, collected thighs,
other men loved the dawn scratching
mountain ranges or ice floes, locomotives, numbers.
For me happiness was to share singing,
praising, cursing, crying with a thousand eyes.
I ask forgiveness for my bad ways:
my life had no use on earth."
— Pablo Neruda (Still Another Day)

"XVII

The days aren't discarded or collected, they are bees
that burned with sweetness or maddened
the sting: the struggle continues,
the journeys go and come between honey and pain.
No, the net of years doesn't unweave: there is no net.
They don't fall drop by drop from a river: there is no river.
Sleep doesn't divide life into halves,
or action, or silence, or honor:
life is like a stone, a single motion,
a lonesome bonfire reflected on the leaves,
an arrow, only one, slow or swift, a metal
that climbs or descends burning in your bones."
— Pablo Neruda (Still Another Day)

"And one by one the nights between our separated cities are joined to the night that unites us."
— Pablo Neruda

""Sucede que me canso de ser hombre.""
— Pablo Neruda

""Here I came to the very edge where nothing at all needs saying...and every day on the balcony of the sea wings open fire is born and everything is blue again like morning." "
— Pablo Neruda

"Todo te lo tragaste, como la lejania, como el mar, como el tiempo... Ese fue mi destino y en el viajo mi anhelo, y en el mi anhelo, todo en ti fue naufragio! (you swallowed everything, like distance, like the sea, like time. This was my destiny and it was the voyage of my longing, in it my longing fell, in you everything sank.)"
— Pablo Neruda

"Do tears not yet spilled wait in small lakes?"
— Pablo Neruda

"la heradera del dia destruida
the heiress of the destroyed day"
— Pablo Neruda

"I grew up in this town, my poetry was born between the hill and the river, it took its voice from the rain, and like the timber, it steeped itself in the forests.
"
— Pablo Neruda

"And what importance do I have in the courtroom of oblivion?"
— Pablo Neruda

"I stand for freedom of expression, doing what you believe in, and going after your dreams."
— Madonna

"I want to be like Gandhi and Martin Luther King and John Lennon but i want to STAY ALIVE."
— Madonna

"Sick and perverted always appeals to me."
— Madonna

"I'm tough, I'm ambitious, and I know exactly what I want. If that makes me a bitch, okay."
— Madonna

"I've been popular and unpopular successful and unsuccessful loved and loathed and I know how meaningless it all is. Therefore I feel free to take whatever risks I want."
— Madonna

""Beauty, to me, is about being comfortable in your own skin. That, or a kick-ass red lipstick.""
— Gwyneth Paltrow

"Memories are what warm you up from the inside. But they're also what tear you apart."
— Haruki Murakami (Kafka on the Shore)

"Anyone who falls in love is searching for the 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."
— Haruki Murakami

"Listen up -- there's no war that will end all wars."
— Haruki Murakami (Kafka on the Shore)

"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 (Norwegian Wood)

"Sometimes fate is like a small sandstorm that keeps changing directions. You change direction but the sandstorm chases you. You turn again, but the storm adjusts. Over and over you play this out, like some ominous dance with death just before dawn. Why? Because this storm isn't something that blew in from far away, something that has nothing to do with you. This storm is you. Something inside of you. So all you can do is give in to it, step right inside the storm, closing your eyes and plugging up your ears so the sand doesn't get in, and walk through it, step by step. There's no sun there, no moon, no direction, no sense of time. Just fine white sand swirling up into the sky like pulverized bones. That's the kind of sandstorm you need to imagine.

An you really will have to make it through that violent, metaphysical, symbolic storm. No matter how metaphysical or symbolic it might be, make no mistake about it: it will cut through flesh like a thousand razor blades. People will bleed there, and you will bleed too. Hot, red blood. You'll catch that blood in your hands, your own blood and the blood of others.

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, in fact, 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 (Kafka on the Shore)

"There's no such thing as perfect writing, just like there's no such thing as perfect despair."
— Haruki Murakami (Hear the Wind Sing)