Haruki Murakami Quotes

By the year 2025, 500 million people will die of smoking. Now, that's a Vietnam War every day for 27 years. That's the Titanic sinking every 27 minutes for 27 years.

Of course the media loves stuff like that so they find this one Rockette. It's like you can have 10,000 people at a rally for [Donald] Trump and 200 people outside, and the 200 people outside make the news.

When you say that after World War I there was a pandemic that killed more people than the war itself, most will say: "Wait, are you kidding? I know World War I, but there was no World War 1.5, was there?" But people were traveling around after the war, and that meant the force of infection was much higher. And the problem is that the rate of travel back then was dramatically less than what we have nowadays.

I can almost understand why people leap from bridges.

Instead of committing suicide, people go to work.

Democracy depends on citizens being informed, and since our media, especially television (which is the most important source of news for most Americans) reports mostly what the people in power do, and repeats what the people in power say, the public is badly informed, and it means we cannot really say we have a functioning democracy.

I do see that there is an argument against suicide: the grief of the worshipers left behind, the awful famine in their hearts, these are too costly terms for the release.

I went public with the alcoholism, very early on... the early '70s. Mercedes McCambridge, the actress, I think was the first recognizable person that went before Congress and talked about it, and I thought that was a good idea, to take some of the stigma away from it and say "Normal, average people can fall prey to it." So it's been public for me. I did a movie about an alcoholic. And today, you're nobody unless you've been to rehab. It seems like everybody has some kind of an addiction.

I've been in Africa, and I've been to hospitals of Africa, and they're not hospitals, they're places where people go to die. And rows and rows and rows of people just dying and the waiting rooms of the hospitals are full of people waiting to get into the beds of the people who died the night before, and they're dying from unnecessary diseases.

For really, dreaming is the well-mannered people's way of committing suicide.

If a theology student in lowa should get up at a PTA luncheon in Sioux City and attack the President's military policy, my guess is that you would probably find it reported somewhere the next morning in the New York Times. But when 300 Congressmen endorse the President's policy, the next morning it is apparently not considered news fit to print.

It kills me sometimes, how people die.

People die all around us all the time. Drop like flies. Overdose. Aids. Sometimes they kill themselves. People come. They go. Dying is the same as rehab or moving back to Missouri. It just means I won't be seeing them again

it is only in statistics that people die by the millions. Each person dies individually, in his own predicament.

People who came to the clinics or came to the fundraiser knew what was happening in their state but didn't realize the profundity of what was happening all over the place. But the third thing [was] that at every single clinic I went to, somebody who worked there - it could have been the doctor, it could have been the receptionist - said, "Thank you for coming, no one ever comes." And it broke my heart...I've used these services, I've had an abortion, I got to be where I am because of access to making choices to have the life I wanted.

People are going so far as to kill themselves over the things that happen online.

We don't judge people for dying in car crashes. But we do judge people when they die of suicide.

Writing, at its heart, is a solitary pursuit, designed to make people depressoids, drug addicts, misanthropes, and antisocial weirdos.

But it's a stigmatized problem, and it's a silent problem. This has to end. Suicide is not just a personal tragedy, it's a key issue of public policy and facing up to it requires political will.

The media isn't only asleep; it doesn't want to know this news, that the people are revolting, in the very best sense of the term, revolting against the thieves in high places and reaching out to each other, which is our great strength.

It may be hard to remember how difficult it was for people to talk about HIV/AIDS back in the 1980's and because of both Ronald Reagan and Nancy Reagan - in particular Mrs Reagan - we started a national conversation, when before nobody would talk about it, nobody wanted to do anything about it. Something that I really appreciate was her very effective but low-key advocacy, but it penetrated the public conscience, and people began to say "hey we have to do something about this too.

I think people don't understand how intimately tied suicide is to mental illness, particularly to depressive illness and bipolar illness.

In South Africa one in four women have AIDS. When you are there it is shocking. So many people are dying from the disease and the same number are getting the disease each year. My main goal was to learn and call attention to some of the things that were happening.

Depression is something that seems really obscure when you see it in a theater, but when you talk to people who come to see it and hear their reactions, you realize that it is such a prevalent part of life and our society today that it really needed to be told, and still needs to be told.

I feel ashamed now that I tried to take my life. It is such a precious thing. I had no one to talk me out of my despair and that was a mistake. You need to keep people close. You need to give them access to your heart.