Haruki Murakami Quotes

Sometimes you feel you have the truth of a moment in your hand, then it slips through your fingers and is lost.

Unfortunately, nature is very much a now-you-see-it, now-you-don't affair. A fish flashes, then dissolves in the water before my eyes like so much salt. Deer apparently ascend bodily into heaven; the brightest oriole fades into leaves.

You stick your finger in the water and you pull it out, and that is how much of a hole you leave when you're gone.

Fame is a fickle food upon a shifting plate.

All is mine but nothing owned, nothing owned for memory, and mine only while I look.

Alas for the affairs of men! When they are fortunate you might compare them to a shadow; and if they are unfortunate, a wet sponge with one dash wipes the picture away.

I do have a sense, and I've never not had it, of how easily things can vanish.

Time is a sort of river of passing events, and strong is its current; no sooner is a thing brought to sight than it is swept by and another takes its place, and this too will be swept away.

Time flies over us, but leaves its shadow behind.

Oh, how swiftly the glory of the world passes away!

Chance gives rise to thoughts, and chance removes them; no art can keep or acquire them.

Our little systems have their day; They have their day and cease to be.

All that remains is was.

… where they will vanish in the night and fog.

I don't want to be something that just comes and goes.

You can never figure out what the future sounds like. As soon as you make it, it's the past.

Sometimes you think things are going to be forever, and then... of course, they're not.

I do have in the back of my head that you never know how long it lasts.

Memory is the most transient of all possessions. And when it goes, it leaves as few traces as stars that have disappeared.

The world changes too fast. You take your eyes off something that's always been there, and the next minute it's just a memory.

Beautiful things grow to a certain height and then they fail and fade off, breathing out memories as they decay. And just as any period decays in our minds, the things of that period should decay too, and in that way they're preserved for a while in the few hearts like mine that react to them. Trying to preserve a century by keeping its relics up to date is like keeping a dying man alive by stimulants.

For our part, when we feel, we evaporate; ah, we breathe ourselves out and away; with each new heartfire we give off a fainter scent. True, someone may tell us: you're in my blood, this room, Spring itself is filled with you . . . To what end? He can't hold us, we vanish within him and around him.

Things always seem to glide away. They come to you, stay a moment, then leave again.

The pen will never be able to move fast enough to write down every word discovered in the space of memory. Some things have been lost forever, other things will perhaps be remembered again, and still other things have been lost and found and lost again. There is no way to be sure of any this.

Like a wind crying endlessly through the universe, Time carries away the names and the deeds of conquerors and commoners alike. And all that we were, all that remains, is in the memories of those who cared we came this way for a brief moment.