Haruki Murakami Quotes

Laid up in ice [mis à la glace].

The last thing I have to say is that ice is the past tense of water. I've always wanted to write that sentence and now I have.

Take ice. Ice is fascinating to me. Ice is the one thing in our world that went from an agricultural product to being manufactured.

I think it's important to have some documentation of the past.

Antiquities are history defaced, or some remnants of history which have casually escaped the shipwreck of time.

The museums and parks are graveyards above the ground- congealed memories of the past that act as a pretext for reality.

I have always had a great interest in visually documenting the past.

History takes time... History makes memory.

All of our records seem to capture a certain period of time for us.

Pompeii is an extraordinary place to be because it was preserved exactly as it was. There are many other sites. If you visit any other antiquity-type sites throughout the world, they're very damaged with what's gone on over the centuries since they were abandoned. But this one was just, like, sealed, so you're looking at rock surfaces and the carving of letters and names in the stones looks like it was done yesterday.

Ice is an interesting subject for contemplation. They told me that they had some in the ice-houses at Fresh Pond five years old which was as good as ever. Why is it that a bucket of water soon becomes putrid, but frozen remains sweet forever? It is commonly said that this is the difference between the affections and the intellect.

Salt is added to dried rose petals with the perfume and spices, when we store them away in covered jars, the summers of our past.

We strain to listen to the ghosts and echoes of our inexpressibly wise past, and we have an obligation to maintain these places, to provide these sanctuaries, so that people may be in the presence of forces larger than those of the moment.

The earth doesn't have a housekeeper to do the dusting. And the dust that falls on it every day remains there. Everything that's come down to us from the past has been conserved by dust.

I'm independent as a hog on ice and a hog on ice is dead, cold, well-preserved and don't need a mother'grabbin, thing.

But when from a long-distant past nothing subsists, after the people are dead, after the things are broken and scattered, taste and smell alone, more fragile but more enduring, more unsubstantial, more persistent, more faithful, remain poised a long time, like souls, remembering, waiting, hoping, amid the ruins of all the rest; and bear unflinchingly, in the tiny and almost impalpable drop of their essence, the vast structure of recollection.

If you're making a time capsule you have to throw my album in there.

The woe of mortality makes humans God-like. It is because we know that we must die that we are so busy making life. It is because we are aware of mortality that we preserve the past and create the future. Mortality is ours without asking--but immortality is something we must build ourselves. Immortality is not a mere absence of death; it is defiance and denial of death. It is 'meaningful' only because there is death, that implacable reality which is to be defied.

If we seek to keep the past alive, we end, I think, by distorting it.

I could write a treatise on the sudden transformation of life into archaeology

Americans care about their past, but for short term gain they ignore it and tear down everything that matters.

We have chaos reigning in the Middle East. There is a great deal of instability. In the past, people would have turned to their church, and some still do. Counterintuitively, people are now turning into themselves to find their roots. The way you do that is through your family tree. "Where did I come from?" There is an urge to preserve the names of the people who produced you.

To know another human being in their essence, you don’t really need to know anything about them - their past, their history, their story. We confuse knowing about with a deeper knowing that is non-conceptual. Knowing about and knowing are totally different modalities. One is concerned with form, the other with the formless. One operates through thought, the other through stillness.

There is no past, as long as books shall live. Books make the past our heritage and our home.

If you live in Europe . . . things change . . . but continuity never seems to break. You don't have to throw the past away.