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

"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)

"Death is not the opposite of life, but a part of it."
— Haruki Murakami (Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman: 24 Stories)

"She waited for the train to pass. Then she said, "I sometimes think that people’s hearts are like deep wells. Nobody knows what’s at the bottom. All you can do is imagine by what comes floating to the surface every once in a while."
— Haruki Murakami (Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman)

"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)

"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)

"But even so, every now and then I would feel a violent stab of loneliness. The very water I drink, the very air I breathe, would feel like long, sharp needles. The pages of a book in my hands would take on the threatening metallic gleam of razor blades. I could hear the roots of loneliness creeping through me when the world was hushed at four o'clock in the morning."
— Haruki Murakami (The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle)

"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)

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

"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)

"The pure present is an ungraspable advance of the past devouring the future. In truth, all sensation is already memory."
— Haruki Murakami (Kafka on the Shore)

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

"There weren't any curtains in the windows, and the books that didn't fit into the bookshelf lay piled on the floor like a bunch of intellectual refugees."
— Haruki Murakami (Sputnik Sweetheart)

"Dreams come from the past, not from the future. Dreams shouldn't control you--you should control them. "
— Haruki Murakami (Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman: 24 Stories)

"A strange, terrific force unlike anything I've ever experienced is sprouting in my heart, taking root there, growing. Shut up behind my rib cage, my warm heart expands and contracts independent of my will--over and over."
— Haruki Murakami (Kafka on the Shore)

"A certain type of perfection can only be realized through a limitless accumulation of the imperfect."
— Haruki Murakami (Kafka on the Shore)

"Being with her I feel a pain, like a frozen knife stuck in my chest. An awful pain, but the funny thing is I'm thankful for it. It's like that frozen pain and my very existence are one.
The pain is an anchor, mooring me here."
— Haruki Murakami (Kafka on the Shore)

"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)

"Not just beautiful, though--the stars are like the trees in the forest, alive and breathing. And they're watching me."
— Haruki Murakami (Kafka on the Shore)

"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)

"Of course it hurt that we could never love each other in a physical way. We would have been far more happy if we had. But that was like the tides, the change of seasons--something immutable, an immovable destiny we could never alter. No matter how cleverly we might shelter it, our delicate friendship wasn't going to last forever. We were bound to reach a dead end. That was painfully clear."
— Haruki Murakami (Sputnik Sweetheart)

"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)

"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)

"Precipitate as weather, she appeared from somewhere, then evaporated, leaving only memory."
— Haruki Murakami (Dance, Dance, Dance)

"In dreams you don't need to make any distinctions between things. Not at all. Boundaries don't exist. So in dreams there are hardly ever collisions. Even if there are, they don't hurt. Reality is different. Reality bites. Reality, reality."
— Haruki Murakami (Sputnik Sweetheart)

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

"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)

"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)

"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)

"When I open them, most of the books have the smell of an earlier time leaking out between the pages - a special odor of the knowledge and emotions that for ages have been calmly resting between the covers. Breathing it in, I glance through a few pages before returning each book to its shelf."
— Haruki Murakami (Kafka on the Shore)

"In the world we live in, what we know and what we don't know are like Siamese twins, inseparable, existing in a state of confusion."
— Haruki Murakami (Sputnik Sweetheart)

"Things outside you are projections of what's inside you, and what's inside you is a projection of what's outside. So when you step into the labyrinth outside you, at the same time you're stepping into the labyrinth inside."
— Haruki Murakami (Kafka on the Shore)

"...There are ways of dying that don't end in funerals. Types of death you can't smell."
— Haruki Murakami (Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman: 24 Stories)

"These days I just can't seem to say what I mean [...]. I just can't. Every time I try to say something, it misses the point. Either that or I end up saying the opposite of what I mean. The more I try to get it right the more mixed up it gets. Sometimes I can't even remember what I was trying to say in the first place. It's like my body's split in two and one of me is chasing the other me around a big pillar. We're running circles around it. The other me has the right words, but I can never catch her."
— Haruki Murakami (Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman: 24 Stories)

"Somewhere in his body--perhaps in the marrow of his bones--he would continue to feel her absence."
— Haruki Murakami (Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman: 24 Stories)

"Don't pointless things have a place, too, in this far-from-perfect world?"
— Haruki Murakami (Sputnik Sweetheart)

"Even castles in the sky can do with a fresh coat of paint."
— Haruki Murakami (South of the Border, West of the Sun)

"Time weighs down on you like an old ambiguous dream. You keep on moving, trying to slip 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)

"My shadow is only half of what it should be."
"Everyone has their shortcomings."
— Haruki Murakami (Kafka on the Shore)

"I was reduced to pure concept. My flesh had dissolved; my form had dissipated. I floated in space. Liberated of my corporeal being, but without dispensation to go anywhere else.I was adrift in the void. Somewhere across the fine line separating nightmare from reality."
— Haruki Murakami (Dance, Dance, Dance)

"Why do people have to be this lonely? What's the point of it all? Millions of people in the 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)

"We knew exactly what we wanted in each other. And even so, it ended. One day it stopped, as if the film simply slipped off the reel. "
— Haruki Murakami (Dance, Dance, Dance)

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

"This person, this self, this me, finally, was made somewhere else. Everything had come from somewhere else, and it would all go somewhere else. I was nothing but a pathway for the person known as me."
— Haruki Murakami (The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle)

"What I saw wasn't a ghost. It was simply--myself. I can never forget how terrified I was that night, and whenever I remember it, this thought always springs to mind: that the most frightening thing in the world is our own self. What do you think?"
— Haruki Murakami (Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman: 24 Stories)

""Sheep hurt my father, and through my father, sheep have also hurt me.""
— Haruki Murakami (A Wild Sheep Chase)

"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 togher. 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)

"When I wake up, my pillow’s cold and damp with tears. But tears for what? I have no idea."
— Haruki Murakami (Kafka on the Shore)