Haruki Murakami Quotes

Out of the corner of one eye, I could see my mother. Out of the corner of the other eye, I could see her shadow on the wall, cast there by the lamplight. It was a big and solid shadow, and it looked so much like my mother that I became frightened. For I could not be sure whether for the rest of my life I would be able to tell when it was really my mother and when it was really her shadow standing between me and the rest of the world.

The world is this incredibly blurry, crazy dream that I'm just sort of stumbling through.

I do not know whether I was then a man dreaming I was a butterfly, or whether I am now a butterfly dreaming I am a man.

What are you, Rose Hathaway? Are you real? You're a dream within a dream. I'm afraid touching you will make me wake up. You'll disappear.

Society? Can we trust us? Doubt it. We're probably not even real, as was revealed in the popular documentary The Matrix. That bloke next door? Made of pixels. Your co-workers? Pixels. You? One pixel. One measly pixel. You haven't even got shoes, for Christ's sake.

We wake sleeping, and sleep waking. I do not see so clearly in my sleep; but as to my being awake, I never found it clear enough and free from clouds.

Ally." Peeta says the words slowly, tasting it. "Friend. Lover. Victor. Enemy. Fiancee. Target. Mutt. Neighbor. Hunter. Tribute. Ally. I'll add it to the list of words I use to try to figure you out. The problem is, I can't tell what's real anymore, and what's made up.

None of it seems real. Who knows? Maybe it isn’t. Maybe it’s actually happening to someone else. Maybe it’s something I imagined. Maybe soon I’m going to wake up and find everything fixed with Lissa and Dimitri. We’ll all be together, and he’ll be there to smile and hold me and tell me everything ‘s going to be okay. Maybe all of this really has been a dream. But I don’t think so.

I tell myself that I know you, and then when I think about it, I realize that I don't.

"Well, it's no use your talking about waking him," said Tweedledum, "when you're only one of the things in his dream. You know very well you're not real."

I'm not sure I know what "normal" is.

It's hard to tell that the world we live in is either a reality or a dream.

Think of my movies as heightening our awareness, not confusing the difference between truth and fiction, but heightening our awareness of how confused we can become about what is real.

I hate not knowing what to believe anymore. I hate not knowing what's real.

The whole series of my life appeared to me as a dream; I sometimes doubted if indeed it were all true, for it never presented itself to my mind with the force of reality.

And this was the main precondition, that anything might be something else. Once I'd accepted that, it followed that I might be mad, or that someone might think me mad. How could I say for certain that I wasn't, if I couldn't say for certain that a curtain wasn't a mountain range?

Sometimes you wake up from a dream. Sometimes you wake up in a dream. And sometimes, every once in a while, you wake up in someone else's dream.

You look like a ghost," Bailey says. He can think of no better way to describe it. "You appear the same way to me, so which of us is real?

Nothing in this world is real

The very act of questioning whether you exist proves you do, because you must be there for the doubt to be entertained in the first place.

I realize that nothing's as it seems.

I feel like I've dreamed half of my life that hasn't happened yet, so a lot of times I'm going along, and I do stuff, and I know that I've done it. I have deja vus more than I have regular experiences. If half of your day is a deja vu, then you start to wonder, 'What is real and what isn't?'

Perhaps life is just that... a dream and a fear.

I don't know what 'normal' means, anyway.

I enter the world called real as one enters a mist.