"Memories are what warm you up from the inside. But they're also what tear you apart."
— 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)

"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)

"Don't feel sorry for yourself. Only assholes do that."
— Haruki Murakami (Norwegian Wood)

"Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional."
— Haruki Murakami

"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

"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)

"Taking crazy things seriously is a serious waste of time."
— Haruki Murakami (Kafka on the Shore)

"What do you think? I'm not a starfish or a pepper tree. I'm a living, breathing human being. Of course I've been in love."
— Haruki Murakami (Kafka on the Shore)

"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)

"What we seek is some kind of compensation for what we put up with."
— Haruki Murakami (Dance, Dance, Dance)

"Chance encounters are what keep us going."
— Haruki Murakami (Kafka on the Shore)

"No matter what they wish for, no matter how far they go, people can never be anything but themselves. That's all."
— Haruki Murakami (Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman: 24 Stories)

"For both of us, it had simply been too enormous an experience. We shared it by not talking about it. Does this make any sense?"
— Haruki Murakami (The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle)

"Everything just blows me away."
— Haruki Murakami (Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman)

"In this world, there are things you can only do alone, and things you can only do with somebody else. It's important to combine the two in just the right amount."
— Haruki Murakami

"Unfortunately, the clock is ticking, the hours are going by. The past increases, the future recedes. Possibilities decreasing, regrets mounting."
— Haruki Murakami

"Whatever it is you're seeking won't come in the form you're expecting."
— Haruki Murakami

"The light of morning decomposes everything."
— Haruki Murakami

"What came first – the music or the misery? Did I listen to music because I was miserable? Or was I miserable because I listened to music? Do all those records turn you into a melancholy person? People worry about kids playing with guns, and teenagers watching violent videos; we are scared that some sort of culture of violence will take them over. Nobody worries about kids listening to thousands – literally thousands – of songs about broken hearts and rejection and pain and misery and loss. The unhappiest people I know, romantically speaking, are the ones who like pop music the most; and I don’t know whether pop music has caused this unhappiness, but I do know that they’ve been listening to the sad songs longer than they’ve been living the unhappy lives."
— Nick Hornby (High Fidelity: A Novel)

"How do people, like, not curse? How is it possible? There are these gaps in speech where you just have to put a "fuck." I'll tell you who the most admirable people in the world are: newscasters. If that was me, I'd be like, "And the motherfuckers flew the fucking plane right into the Twin Towers." How could you not, if you're a human being? Maybe they're not so admirable. Maybe they're robot zombies."
— Nick Hornby (A Long Way Down)

"It seems to me now that the plain state of being human is dramatic enough for anyone; you don't need to be a heroin addict or a performance poet to experience extremity. You just have to love someone."
— Nick Hornby (How to Be Good)

"The trouble with my generation is that we all think we're fucking geniuses. Making something isn't good enough for us, and neither is selling something, or teaching something, or even just doing something; we have to be something."
— Nick Hornby (A Long Way Down)

"One could argue that most of the trouble in the world is caused by introspection."
— Nick Hornby (A Long Way Down)

"I'm a good person. In most ways. But I'm beginning to think that being a good person in most ways doesn't count for anything very much, if your a bad person in one way."
— Nick Hornby (How to Be Good)

"You're fucked. You thought you were going to be someone, but now it's obvious you're nobody. You haven't got as much talent as you thought you had, and there was no Plan B, and you got no skills and no education, and now you're looking at forty or fifty years of nothing. Less than nothing, probably. That's pretty heavy. That's worse than having the brain thing, because what you got now will take a lot longer to kill you. You've got the choice of a slow, painful death, or a quick, merciful one."
— Nick Hornby (A Long Way Down)

""Human beings are millions of things in one day.""
— Nick Hornby (A Long Way Down)

"Once you stop pretending that everything's shitty and you can't wait to get out of it...then it gets more painful, not less. Telling yourself life is shit is like an anesthetic, and when you stop taking the Advil, then you really can tell how much it hurts, and where, and it's not like that kind of pain does anyone a whole lot of good. "
— Nick Hornby (A Long Way Down)

"Most people have a rope that ties them to someone, and that rope can be short or it can be long. (Be long. Belong. Get it?) You don't know how long, though. It's not your choice."
— Nick Hornby (A Long Way Down)

"I'd stay there, or not, and I'd eat, or not, and I'd drink, or not, and go home, or not, and what I did or didn't do wouldn't matter to anyone at all. And I walked for most of the day. Do people get sad on holiday sometimes? I can imagine they do, having all that time to think."
— Nick Hornby (A Long Way Down)

"The sky grew darker, painted blue on blue, one stroke at a time, into deeper and deeper shades of night."
— Haruki Murakami (Dance, Dance, Dance)

"Instead of things I'm good at, it might be faster to list the things I can't do. I can't cook or clean the house. My room's a mess, and I'm always losing things. I love music, but I can't sing a note. I'm clumsy and can barely sew a stitch. My sense of direction is the pits, and I can't tell left from right half the time. When I get angry, I tend to break things. Plates and pencils, alarm clocks. Later on I regret it, but at the time I can't help myself. I have no money in the bank. I'm bashful for no reason, and I have hardly any friends to speak of."
— Haruki Murakami

"Everyone may be ordinary, but they're not normal."
— Haruki Murakami (Hardboiled Wonderland and the End of the World)

"...I have this strange feeling that I'm not myself anymore. It's hard to put into words, but I guess it's like I was fast asleep, and someone came, disassembled me, and hurriedly put me back together again. That sort of feeling."
— Haruki Murakami (Sputnik Sweetheart)

"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

"The sun sliced through the windshield, sealing me in light. I closed my eyes and felt the warmth on my eyelids. Sunlight traveled a long distance to reach this planet; an infinitesimal portion of that sunlight was enough to warm my eyelids. I was moved. That something as insignificant as an eyelid had its place in the workings on the universe, that the cosmic order did not overlook this momentary fact."
— Haruki Murakami

"Not that we were incompatible: we just had nothing to talk about."
— Haruki Murakami (Norwegian Wood)

"Potentiality knocks on the door of my heart. [On Seeing The 100% Perfect Girl One Beautiful April Morning ]"
— Haruki Murakami (The Elephant Vanishes: Stories)

"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 lake are beautiful. So stop eating yourself alive. Things will go where they're supposed to go if you just let them take their natural course."
— Haruki Murakami

"Mediocrity is like a spot on your shirt, it never comes off."
— Haruki Murakami (Dance, Dance, Dance)

"Hard is trying to rebuild yourself, piece by piece, with no instruction book, and no clue as to where all the important bits are supposed to go."
— Nick Hornby (A Long Way Down)

"[...] falling in love with someone beautiful and intelligent and the rest of it, then feeling like a blank twit put you at something of a disadvantage."
— Nick Hornby (About a Boy)

"I’m free, I think. I shut my eyes and think hard and deep about how free I am, but I can’t really understand what it means. All I know is I’m totally alone. All alone in an unfamiliar place, like some solitary explorer who’s lost his compass and his map. Is this what it means to be free? I don’t know, and I give up thinking about it."
— Haruki Murakami (Kafka on the Shore)

"The evening's the best part of the day. You've done your day's work. Now you can put your feet up and enjoy it."
— Kazuo Ishiguro (The Remains of the Day)

"Sometimes people are beautiful.
Not in looks.
Not in what they say.
Just in what they are."
— Markus Zusak (I Am the Messenger)

"People aren't either wicked or noble. They're like chef's salads, with good things and bad things chopped and mixed together in a vinaigrette of confusion and conflict."
— Lemony Snicket (The Grim Grotto)

"...you know that a good, long session of weeping can often make you feel better, even if your circumstances have not changed one bit."
— Lemony Snicket (The Bad Beginning)

"The sad truth is the truth is sad."
— Lemony Snicket (The Hostile Hospital)

"I don't know if you've ever noticed this, but first impressions are often entirely wrong."
— Lemony Snicket (The Bad Beginning)

"They didn't understand it, but like so many unfortunate events in life, just because you don't understand it doesn't mean it isn't so."
— Lemony Snicket (The Bad Beginning)