Haruki Murakami Quotes

Every man is obsessed by the memories of his own youth.

are memories pictures or the secret doorway?

It was mint and memories and the past and the future and she felt as if she’d done this before and already she longed to do it again.

I came to the place of my birth and cried: "The friends of my youth, where are they?"--and an echo answered, "Where are they?

There are moments when I can wander through my childhood's landscape, through rooms long ago, remember how they were furnished, where the pictures hung on the walls, the way the light fell. It's like a film - little scraps of a film, which I set running and which I can reconstruct to the last detail - except their smell.

Some memories are realities, and are better than anything that can ever happen to one again.

People try to keep their past, like kind of holding on to their past. Every Springsteen song talks about that.

I tend to live in the past because most of my life is there.

I miss college.

The young remember most deeply.... When we are old and failing, it is the memories of childhood which can be summoned most clearly.

I am sifting my memories, the way men pan the dirt under a barroom floor for the bits of gold dust that fall between the cracks. It's small mining-- small mining. You're too young a man to be panning memories, Adam. You should be getting yourself some new ones, so that the mining will be richer when you come to age.

Reminiscences make one feel so deliciously aged and sad.

Mild brown eyes beckon me to the past, but memory provides no clue.

Shall memory restore The steps and the shore, The face and the meeting place.

There is a stage you reach, Deagle thinks, a time somewhere in early middle age, when your past ceases to be about yourself. Your connection to your former life is like a dream or delirium, and that person who you once were is merely a fond acquaintance, or a beloved character from a storybook. This is how memory becomes nostalgia. They are two very different things - the same way that a person is different from a photograph of a person.

Oh, to be seventy again!

I think memory is the most important asset of human beings. It's a kind of fuel; it burns and it warms you. My memory is like a chest: There are so many drawers in that chest, and when I want to be a fifteen-year-old boy, I open up a certain drawer and I find the scenery I saw when I was a boy in Kobe. I can smell the air, and I can touch the ground, and I can see the green of the trees. That's why I want to write a book.

How that name comes up. Mixing memory and desire

No matter how far we travel, the memories will follow in the baggage car.

In old age, you realise that while you're divided from your youth by decades, you can close your eyes and summon it at will. As a writer it puts one at a distinct advantage.

I was always attracted to the past as a kid.

Leftovers in their less visible form are called memories. Stored in the refrigerator of the mind and the cupboard of the heart.

My greatest inspiration is memory.

By the time the discussion starts about a movie, it's like bringing up an old boyfriend. It's like, 'I don't even remember exactly what he was like, and now we have to talk about it?'

I exist only in the past.