Haruki Murakami Quotes

I don't know a whole lot about symbolism. There seems to me to be a potential danger in symbolism. I feel more comfortable with metaphors and similes.

The world is emblematic. Parts of speech are metaphors, because the whole of nature is a metaphor of the human mind.

Two fundamental literary qualities: supernaturalism and irony.

Being a literature major, you know, I'm very familiar with the ways symbolism is used in our sort of mythic tales of society, so anyone who is consciously trying to pull that off I think is really interesting and clearly very smart.

Symbolism is no mere idle fancy or corrupt degeneration: it is inherent in the very texture of human life.

What is remembered is not a deed in stone but a metaphor. Meta = above. Pheren = to carry. That which is carried above the literalness of life. A way of thinking that avoids the problems of gravity. The word won't let me down. The single word that can release me from all that unuttered weight.

Everything in life is a metaphor.

Poetry begins in trivial metaphors, pretty metaphors, "grace" metaphors, and goes on to the profoundest thinking that we have. Poetry provides the one permissible way of saying one thing and meaning another. People say, "Why don’t you say what you mean?" We never do that, do we, being all of us too much poets. We like to talk in parables and in hints and in indirections - whether from diffidence or some other instinct.

We are symbols, and inhabit symbols.

If you have distance from the events, then your story can work as an analogy or parable rather than its literal narrative.

I'm an old English major from way back, so I do have fun tearing apart texts and trying to find the hidden secrets and the subtexts in there.

My book has a very simple surface, but there are layers of irony and paradox all the way through it.

Symbolism perhaps is a bit in your face, and I've tried my best to control that as best I can as I've grown older and thought that one could approach something with a little more subtlety.

I like to play with tropes.

The thing about metaphors is that, if you give them away, you give away the mystery.

The laws of literature, like the laws of gossip, usually demand exaggeration, decontextualization, a heightened or minimalized reality, and a lot more shape and order and impact than everyday life.

I think cinema is closer to allegories than to reality. It's closer to our dreams.

My joke is that my father was a minister and my mother was an English teacher, so I'm trained to see the world in terms of symbols, which is hard when you just want to make toast.

Life is like an analogy.

An allegory is not meant to be taken literally. There is a great lack of comprehension on the part of some readers.

Everything for me becomes allegory.

I seldom deal in symbolisms; if there be hidden meanings in my verse, they are there without my knowledge.

Philosophers are best able to understand properly the allegorical passages of the Koran on the basis of their logical training. There is no religious stipulation that all such passages have to be interpreted literally.

We often find far more power in a symbol than in something that is an an actuality.

I don't ever get too literal.