top of page
.png){kind=small}
Explore more quotes by Haruki Murakami
"It just happens to be the way that I'm made. I have to write things down to feel I fully comprehend them."
"You live by yourself for a stretch of time and you get to staring at different objects. Sometimes you talk to yourself. You take meals in crowded joints. You develop an intimate relationship with your used Subaru. You slowly but surely become a has-been."
"It was as if my whole life revolved around trying to judge the appropriate point in a conversation to say goodbye."
"One other thing I learned from working in a company was that the majority of people in the world have no problem following orders. They're actually happy to be told what to do. They might complain, but that's not how they really feel. They just grumble out of habit. If you told them to think for themselves, and make their own decisions and take responsibility for them, they'd be clueless."
"I don't know much about the world, but I do know one thing for sure. If I'm pessimistic, then the adults in this world who are not pessimistic are a bunch of idiots."
"I'm not afraid to die. What I'm afraid of is having reality get the better of me, of having reality leave me behind."
"There are three ways you can get along with a girl: one, shut up and listen to what she has to say; two, tell her you like what she's wearing; and three, treat her to really good food...If you do all that and still don't get the results you want, better give up."
"There are symbolic dreams-dreams that symbolize some reality. Then there are symbolic realities-realities that symbolize a dream."
"In any case, though, I believe that I have not been fair to you and that, as a result, I must have led you around in circles and hurt you deeply."
Exlpore more War quotes
"What branch do you want to go in? "I don' give a god-damn, said Pilon jauntily. "I guess we need men like you in the infantry. And Pilon was written so. He turned then to Big Joe, and the Portagee was getting sober. "Where do you want to go? "I want to go home, Big Joe said miserably. The sergeant put him in the infantry too."
"People are so different in wartime. No one gets to be ordinary. Not really."
"They meet, as we shall meet tomorrow, to murder one another; they kill and maim tens of thousands, and then have thanksgiving services for having killed so many people (they even exaggerate the number), and they announce a victory, supposing that the more people they have killed the greater their achievement. How does God above look at them and hear them?" exclaimed Prince Andrew in a shrill, piercing voice. "Ah, my friend, it has of late become hard for me to live. I see that I have begun to understand too much. And it doesn't do for man to taste of the tree of knowledge of good and evil.... Ah, well, it's not for long!" he added."
"How very like humans to pervert a message of love and peace to make it into an ideology of war and oppression to serve their own ends."
"That's my town,' Joaquin said. 'What a fine town, but how the buena gente, the good people of that town, have suffered in this war.' Then, his face grave, 'There they shot my father. My mother. My brother-in-law and now my sister.' 'What barbarians,' Robert Jordan said. How many times had he heard this? How many times had he watched people say it with difficulty? How many times had he seen their eyes fill and their throats harden with the difficulty of saying my father, or my brother, or my mother, or my sister? He could not remember how many times he heard them mention their dead in this way. Nearly always they spoke as this boy did now; suddenly and apropos of the mention of the town and always you said, 'What barbarians."
"In the Second World War he took no public part, having escaped to a neutral country just before its outbreak. In private conversation he was wont to say that homicidal lunatics were well employed in killing each other, but that sensible men would keep out of their way while they were doing it. Fortunately this outlook, which is reminiscent of Bentham, has become rare in this age, which recognizes that heroism has a value independent of its utility. The Last Survivor of a Dead Epoch."
"Om rubed his head. This wasn't god-like thinking. It seemed simpler when you were up here. It was all a game. You forgot that it wasn't a game down there. People died. Bits got chopped off. We're like eagles up here, he thought. Sometimes we show tortoise how to fly. Then we let go."
bottom of page