Haruki Murakami

"If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking."

[...] even if we hadn't met that day, my life might not have been any different. We had met that day because we were supposed to meet. If we hadn't met then and there, we would have just met somewhere else sometime.

"A gentleman is someone who does not what he wants to do but what he should do."

If you're in pitch blackness, all you can do is sit tight until your eyes get used to the dark.

What made [the houses] look strange it's hard to say, but that was the first thing I felt when I saw them. My reaction was a lot like what we feel from attempts to draw unreality in a pleasant way. It occurred to me that this was what you might get if Walt Disney did an animated version of a Munch painting.

How many Sundays - how many hundreds of Sundays like this - lay ahead of me? "Quiet, peaceful, and lonely," I said aloud to myself.

"They're scared to death somebody's gonna find out they don't know something. They all read the same books and they all throw around the same words, and they get off listening to John Coltrane and seeing Pasolini movies. You call that 'revolution'?"

Only the dead stay seventeen forever.

"I don't know, I feel like this isn't the real world. The people, the scene: they just don't seem real to me."

"That's the kind of death that frightens me. The shadow of death slowly, slowly eats away at the region of life, and before you know it everything's dark and you can't see, and the people around you think of you as more dead than alive. I hate that, I couldn't stand it."

"Nobody likes being alone that much. I don't go out of my way to make friends, t

True, given time enough, I can remember her face. I start joining images - her tiny, cold hand; her straight, black hair so smooth and cool to the touch; a soft, rounded earlobe and the microscopic mole just beneath it; the camel-hair coat she wore in the winter; her habit of looking straight into my eyes when asking a question; the slight trembling that would come to her voice now and then (as though she were speaking on a windy hilltop) - and suddenly her face is there, always in profile at first, because Naoko and I were always out walking together, side by side.