Haruki Murakami Quotes

It's not magic! It's physics. The speed of the turn is what keeps you upright. It's like a spinning top.

That great Cathedral space which was childhood.

When I was little there was a picture in one of our books, a dark place into which a single weak ray of light came slanting upon two faces lifted out of the shadow.

For I do not want any one to read my book carelessly. I have suffered too much grief in setting down these memories. Six years have already passed since my friend went away from me, with his sheep. If I try to describe him here, it is to make sure that I shall not forget him. To forget a friend is sad. Not every one has had a friend. And if I forget him, I may become like the grown-ups who are no longer interested in anything but figures.

Cut word lines — Cut music lines — Smash the control images — Smash the control machine — Burn the books — Kill the priests — Kill! Kill! Kill!

Oh God! that one might read the book of fate, And see the revolution of the times Make mountains level, and the continent, Weary of solid firmness, melt itself Into the sea.

But I like my madness. There is a thrill in it unknown to such sanity as yours. ~ Book 1, Chapter 9.

Books everywhere. On the shelves and on the small space above the rows of books and all along the floor and under chairs, books that I have read, books that I have not read.

I first met Myra Henshawe when I was fifteen, but I had known her about ever since I could remember anything at all.

Once, in my father's bookshop, I heard a regular customer say that few things leave a deeper mark on a reader than the first book that finds its way into his heart. Those first images, the echo of words we think we have left behind, accompany us throughout our lives and sculpt a palace in our memory to which, sooner or later—no matter how many books we read, how many worlds we discover, or how much we learn or forget—we will return.

The books one reads in childhood, and perhaps most of all the bad and good bad books, create in one's mind a sort of false map of the world, a series of fabulous countries into which one can retreat at odd moments throughout the rest of life, and which in some cases can survive a visit to the real countries which they are supposed to represent.

My books hold between their covers every story I've ever known and still remember, or have now forgotten, or may one day read; they fill the space around me with ancient and new voices.

I still remember the day my father took me to the Cemetery of Forgotten Books for the first time.

Madness, as I understood it from books, meant a person who was open to the high white whine of everything.

I closed the gulf of anarchy and brought order out of chaos. I rewarded merit regardless of birth or wealth, wherever I found it. I abolished feudalism and restored equality to all regardless of religion and before the law. I fought the decrepit monarchies of the Old Regime because the alternative was the destruction of all this. I purified the Revolution.

All we had was her room, her stories, and the quiet that settled in as we tried in vain to spread ourselves out and fill the space she'd left behind.

In that part of the book of my memory before which little can be read, there is a heading, which says: ‘Incipit vita nova: Here begins the new life’.

Anger simply means that your personal power - your personal space, your personal sense of being - has been violated

Civilization must be destroyed. The hairy saints of the North have earned this crumb by their complaints.

Through reading, I escaped the bad parts of my life in the South Bronx. And, through books, I got to travel the world and the universe. It, to me, was a passport out of my childhood and it remains a way - through the power of words - to change the world.

To some physicists chaos is a science of process rather than state, of becoming rather than being.

When I was a kid, all I liked were books and chocolate.

An artist needs a certain amount of turmoil and confusion.

Not the power to remember, but its very opposite, the power to forget, is a necessary condition of our existence. If the lore of the transmigration of souls is a true one, then these, between their exchange of bodies, must pass through the sea of forgetfulness.

[Regarding] the soul, I'm a little wary of any discourse on that topic that pretends to have an answer, so I tend to keep my musings to myself. There is interesting, legitimate metaphysical work on the topic going at least as far back as Leibniz and continuing today, following the theme that consciousness, or at least computation, might be at least as fundamental as phenomena such as space, time, energy, and matter, which are the usual subject matter of physics. I follow that sort of thing with interest but with very modest expectations that answers will be arrived at during my lifetime.