Nik ✨ > Nik's Quotes

“Is it disrespectful to the House to love some Statues more than others? I sometimes ask Myself this question. It is my belief that the House itself loves and blesses equally everything that it has created. Should I try to do the same? Yet, at the same time, I can see that it is in the nature of men to prefer one thing to another, to find one thing more meaningful than another.”
― Susanna Clarke, Piranesi

“You got to know your limits. Once is enough, but you got to learn. A little caution never hurt anyone. A good woodsman has only one scar on him. No more, no less.”
― Haruki Murakami, Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World

“Losing you is most difficult for me, but the nature of my love for you is what matters. If it distorts into half-truth, then perhaps it is better not to love you. I must keep my mind but loose you.”
― Haruki Murakami, Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World

“Kindness and a caring mind are two separate qualities. Kindness is manners. It is superficial custom, an acquired practice. Not so the mind. The mind is deeper, stronger, and, I believe, it is far more inconstant.”
― Haruki Murakami, Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World

“Fairness is a concept that holds only in limited situations. Yet we want the concept to extend to everything, in and out of phase. From snails to hardware stores to married life. Maybe no one finds it, or even misses it, but fairness is like love. What is given has nothing to do with what we seek.”
― Haruki Murakami, Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World

“You're wrong. The mind is not like raindrops. It does not fall from the skies, it does not lose itself among other things. If you believe in me at all, then believe this: I promise you I will find it. Everything depends on this."

"I believe you," she whispers after a moment. "Please find my mind.”
― Haruki Murakami, Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World

“Once again, life had a lesson to teach me: It takes years to build up, it takes moments to destroy.”
― Haruki Murakami, Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World

“Most human activities are predicated on the assumption that life goes on. If you take that premise away, what is there left?”
― Haruki Murakami, Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World

“What was lost was lost. There was no retrieving it, however you schemed, no returning to how things were, no going back.”
― Haruki Murakami, Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World

“But didn't you say you were satisfied with your life?"

"Word games," I dismissed. "Every army needs a flag.”
― Haruki Murakami, Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World

“But like a boat with a twisted rudder, I kept coming back to the same place. I wasn't going anywhere. I was myself, waiting on the shore for me to return.

Was that so depressing?

Who knows? Maybe that was 'despair.' What Turgenev called 'disillusionment.' Or Dostoyevsky, 'hell.' Or Somerset Maugham, 'reality.' Whatever the label, I figured it was me.”
― Haruki Murakami, Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World

“I am here, alone, at the end of the world. I reach out and touch nothing.”.”
― Haruki Murakami, Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World

“How can the mind be so imperfect?" she says with a smile.

I look at my hands. Bathed in the moonlight, they seem like statues, proportioned to no purpose.

"It may well be imperfect," I say, "but it leaves traces. And we can follow those traces, like footsteps in the snow."

"Where do the lead?"

"To oneself," I answer. "That's where the mind is. Without the mind, nothing leads anywhere."

I look up. The winter moon is brilliant, over the Town, above the Wall.

"Not one thing is your fault," I comfort her.”
― Haruki Murakami, Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World

“Listen. I may not be much, but I'm all I've got. Maybe you need a magnifying glass to find my face in my high school graduation photo. Maybe I haven't got any family or friends. Yes, yes, I know all that. But, strange as it might seem, I'm not entirely dissatisfied with life... I feel pretty much at home with what I am. I don't want to go anywhere. I don't want any unicorns behind fences.”
― Haruki Murakami, Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World

“Now for a good twelve-hour sleep, I told myself. Twelve solid hours. Let birds sing, let people go to work. Somewhere out there, a volcano might blow, Israeli commandos might decimate a Palestinian village. I couldn't stop it. I was going to sleep.”
― Haruki Murakami, Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World

“Many are the women who can take their clothes off seductively, but women who can charm as they dress?”
― Haruki Murakami, Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World

“Had I done the right thing by not telling her? Maybe not. Who on earth wanted the right thing anyway? Yet what meaning could there be if nothing was right? If nothing was fair? Fairness is a concept that holds only in limited situations. Yet we want the concept to extend to everything, in and out of phase.”
― Haruki Murakami, Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World

“Flaws in oneself open you up to others with flaws.”
― Haruki Murakami, Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World

“No two human beings are alike; it's a question of identity. And what is identity? The cognitive system arisin' from the aggregate memories of that individual's past experiences. The layman's word for this is the mind. Not two human beings have the same mind. At the same time, human beings have almost no grasp of their own cognitive systems. I don't, you don't, nobody does. All we know—or think we know—is but a fraction of the whole cake. A mere tip of the icing.”
― Haruki Murakami, Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World