Haruki Murakami Quotes

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

[But] we accept irony through a device called metaphor. And through that we grow and become deeper human beings.

We are symbols, and inhabit symbols.

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.

Life is like an analogy.

It is through symbols that man consciously or unconsciously lives, works and has his being.

A simile is just a metaphor with the scaffolding still up.

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.

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

I love metaphor. It provides two loaves where there seems to be one. Sometimes it throws in a load of fish.

The word "metaphor" means carrying something from one place to another . . . and it is when you describe something by using a word for something that it isn't. This means that the word "metaphor" is a metaphor. I think it should be called a lie because a pig is not like a day and people people do not have skeletons in their cupboards. And when I try and make a picture of the phrase in my head it just confuses me because imagining and apple in someone's eye doesn't have anything to do with liking someone a lot and it makes you forget what the person was talking about.

When does an object become a symbol? All I know is you cannot force it.

Two fundamental literary qualities: supernaturalism and irony.

It's in literature that true life can be found. It's under the mask of fiction that you can tell the truth.

The point—the power to hurt—of all figures [of speech] consist in the truthfulness of their application.

There's a lot of places where the image of a cube as a thing of power is pertinent. I don't know why that is. I don't have any mythic explanation for it, but it seems to work for people.

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

Ray Bradbury taught me the importance of metaphor and simile and poetic style.

. . . all meaning comes from analogies.

All art speaks in signs and symbols. No one can explain how it happens that the artist can waken to life in us the existence that he has seen and lives through. No artistic speech is the adequate expression of what it represents; its vital force comes from what is unspoken in it.

The metaphors exist for the stories.

I trust the symbol that is arrived at in the making of the painting. Meaningful symbols aren't invented as such, they are made or discovered as symbol later.

I've grown up on a diet of metaphors. If young writers would find those writers who can give them metaphors by the bushel and the peck, then they'll become better writers - to learn how to capsualize things and present them in metaphorical form.

The symbol is greater than visible substance. . . . Unhappy the land that has no symbols, or that chooses their meaning without great care.

Allegories, when well chosen, are like so many tracks of light in a discourse, that make everything about them clear and beautiful.