Haruki Murakami Quotes

The past is no farther away than your pillow.

Memories, how they linger in the twilight and in the wee small hours sometimes just before dawn.

Every time I open the drawer, it's a trip down Memory Lane, which, if you don't turn off at the right exit, merges straight into the Masochistic Nostalgia Highway.

Do we always grind through the present, doomed to throw a gold haze of fond retrospect over the past?

Memories have ways of becoming independent of the reality they evoke. They can soften us against those we were deeply hurt by or they can make us resent those we once accepted and loved unconditionally.

She went out and took a last long look at the shabby little library. She knew she would never see it again. Eyes changed after they looked at new things. If in the years to be she were to come back, her new eyes might make everything seem different from the way she saw it now. The way it was now was the way she wanted to remember it.

I felt like lying down by the side of the trail and remembering it all

The past is never where you think you left it.

memories should be sharp when one has nothing else to live for

All pasts are like poems; one can derive a thousand things, but not live in them.

The one charm of the past is that it is the past.

But standing in that hallway, it was all coming back to me. Memories were waiting at the edges of things, beckoning to me.

[Memory] is a passion no less powerful or pervasive than love. It is [the ability] to live in more than one world, to prevent the past from fading, and to call upon the future to illuminate it.

There is a general place in your brain, I think, reserved for melancholy of relationships past. It grows and prospers as life progresses, forcing you finally, against your better judgment, to listen to country music.

It's nine o'clock on a Saturday, the regular crowd shuffles in / There's an old man sitting next to me making love to his tonic and gin / He says, 'Son, can you play me a memory?/ I'm not really sure how it goes / But it's sad and it's sweet, and I knew it complete when I wore a younger man's clothes.'

I love people, but I love the thought and memory of them just as much.

It is strange how we hold on to the pieces of the past while we wait for our futures.

Whenever we're having a great time, we're already anticipating the day when we will remember this great time. Many of us live in that unreal area between the past, the present, and the future.

If the portraits of our absent friends are pleasant to us, which renew our memory of them and relieve our regret for their absence by a false and empty consolation, how much more pleasant are letters which bring us the written characters of the absent friend.

Still are the thoughts to memory dear.

What's gone will never come back, but it exists when you think of it.

Are there not some places where we seem to breathe sadness? — why, we cannot tell. It is a chain of recollections — an idea which carries you back to other times, to other places — which, very likely, have no connection with the present time and place.

It's stupid, I know, but I care. All the things that meant so much when we were young. Under the blankets late at night, listening to long-distance radio. All those things lost now or broken. Can you remember? Can you remember that feeling? Perhaps I ought to go to a doctor.

There were hundreds of them spread across the floor, each telling its own tale of triumph or sadness, each letter representing a phase in her life. She had kept them all.