Haruki Murakami Quotes

Time isn't precious at all, because it is an illusion.

Age affects how people experience time.

I have never been able to grasp the meaning of time. I don't believe it exists. I've felt this again and again, when alone and out in nature. On such occasions, time does not exist. Nor does the future exist.

Is that all time is - our perception of how quickly it does or does not pass?

Time is a fluid condition which has no existence except in the momentary avatars of individual people. There is no such thing as was - only is.

Time is not outside us, but inside. Only we live with past, present, and future, and the present is too brief to experience anyway; it is retained afterward and then it is either codified or it slips into amnesia.

The mind exists in time, in fact the mind is time; it exists in the past and the future. And remember, time consists of only two tenses, the past and the future. The present is not part of time, the present is part of eternity.

Nothing, of course, begins at the time you think it did.

Abstracts are real and time is a lie, it cannot be measured when one moment can expand to hold everything.

For some reason, I have a very strange conception of time. I am constantly hovering at some overview, more macro.

There are some stories you can't hear enough. They are the same every time you hear them. But you are not. That's one reliable way of understanding time.

What we perceive as the present is the vivid fringe of memory tinged with anticipation.

The diameter of each day is measured by the stretch of thought - not by the rising and setting of the sun.

Time interval is a strange and contradictory matter in the mind. It would be reasonable to suppose that a routine time or an eventless time would seem interminable. It should be so, but it is not. It is the dull eventless times that have no duration whatever. A time splashed with interest, wounded with tragedy, crevassed with joy - that's the time that seems long in the memory. And this is right when you think about it. Eventlessness has no posts to drape duration on. From nothing to nothing is no time at all.

all conscious thought is a process in time; so that to think consciously about Time is like trying to use a foot-rule to measure its own length.

The truth is that the past exists no more than the future, even though it feels as though it does.

The idea that memory is linear is nonsense. What we have in our heads is a collection of frames. As to time itself-can it be linear when all these snatches of other presents exist at once in your mind? A very elusive and tricky concept, time.

No one doubts but that we imagine time from the very fact that we imagine other bodies to be moved slower or faster or equally fast. We are accustomed to determine duration by the aid of some measure of motion.

Time, as is well known, sometimes flies like a bird and sometimes crawls like a worm, but human beings are generally particularly happy when they don't notice whether it's passing quickly or slowly.

We think we’re in the present, but we aren't. The present we know is only a movie of the past.

There is this thing about time that you can't see at the time you're at.

Time is a strange thing. It is a whimsical tyrant, which in every century has a different face for all that one says and does.

The perception of duration itself presupposes a duration of perception.

Most people think it's the other way around: that time is going faster and we're doing less. But really time seems to be going faster because we're cramming so much into it.