“If you can love someone with your whole heart, even one person, then there's salvation in life. Even if you can't get together with that person.”
― Haruki Murakami, quote from 1Q84
“I can bear any pain as long as it has meaning.”
― Haruki Murakami, quote from 1Q84
“That's what the world is , after all: an endless battle of contrasting memories.”
― Haruki Murakami, quote from 1Q84
“I'm a very ordinary human being; I just happen to like reading books.”
― Haruki Murakami, quote from 1Q84
“Even if we could turn back, we'd probably never end up where we started.”
― Haruki Murakami, quote from 1Q84
“It is not that the meaning cannot be explained. But there are certain meanings that are lost forever the moment they are explained in words.”
― Haruki Murakami, quote from 1Q84
“I'm tired of living unable to love anyone. I don't have a single friend - not one. And, worst of all, I can't even love myself. Why is that? Why can't I love myself? It's because I can't love anyone else. A person learns how to love himself through the simple acts of loving and being loved by someone else. Do you understand what I am saying? A person who is incapable of loving another cannot properly love himself.”
― Haruki Murakami, quote from 1Q84
“You can keep as quiet as you like, but one of these days somebody is going to find you.”
― Haruki Murakami, quote from 1Q84
“Find me now. Before someone else does.”
― Haruki Murakami, quote from 1Q84
“Life is not like water. Things in life don't necessarily flow over the shortest possible route.”
― Haruki Murakami, quote from 1Q84
“If you can't understand it without an explanation, you can't understand it with an explanation.”
― Haruki Murakami, quote from 1Q84
“In a sense, I'm the one who ruined me: I did it myself.”
― Haruki Murakami, quote from 1Q84
“I am nothing. I’m like someone who’s been thrown into the ocean at night, floating all alone. I reach out, but no one is there. I call out, but no one answers. I have no connection to anything.”
― Haruki Murakami, quote from 1Q84
“As I see it, you are living with something that you keep hidden deep inside. Something heavy. I felt it from the first time I met you. You have a strong gaze, as if you have made up your mind about something. To tell you the truth, I myself carry such things around inside. Heavy things. That is how I can see it in you.”
― Haruki Murakami, quote from 1Q84
“What I want is for the two of us to meet somewhere by chance one day, like, passing on the street, or getting on the same bus.”
― Haruki Murakami, quote from 1Q84
“Loneliness becomes an acid that eats away at you.”
― Haruki Murakami, quote from 1Q84
“I've been lonely for so long. And I've been hurt so deeply. If only I could have met you again a long time ago, then I wouldn't have had to take all these detours to get here.'
Tengo shook his head. 'I don't think so. This way is just fine. This is exactly the right time. For both of us. [...] We needed that much time.... to understand how lonely we really were.”
― Haruki Murakami, quote from 1Q84
“But there are certain meanings that are lost forever the moment they are explained in words.”
― Haruki Murakami, quote from 1Q84
“As if to build a fence around the fatal emptiness inside her, she had to create a sunny person that she became. But if you peeled away the ornamental egos that she had built, there was only an abbys of nothingness and the intense thirst that came with it. Though she tried to forget it, the nothingness would visit her periodically - on a lonely rainy afternoon, or at dawn when she woke up from a nightmare. What she needed at such times was to be held by someone, anyone.”
― Haruki Murakami, quote from 1Q84
“I'm a coward when it comes to matters of the heart. That is my fatal flaw.”
― Haruki Murakami, quote from 1Q84
“A person learns how to love himself through the simple acts of loving and being loved by someone else.”
― Haruki Murakami, quote from 1Q84
“Wasn't it better if they kept this desire to see each other hidden within them, and never actually got together? That way, there would always be hope in their hearts. That hope would be a small, yet vital flame that warmed them to their core-- a tiny flame to cup one's hands around and protect from the wind, a flame that the violent winds of reality might easily extinguish.”
― Haruki Murakami, quote from 1Q84
“Knowledge and ability were tools, not things to show off.”
― Haruki Murakami, quote from 1Q84
“It's just that you're about to do something out of the ordinary. And after you do something like that, the everyday look of things might seem to change a little. Things may look different to you than they did before. But don't let appearances fool you. There's always only one reality.”
― Haruki Murakami, quote from 1Q84
“Life is so uncertain: you never know what could happen. One way to deal with that is to keep your pajamas washed.”
― Haruki Murakami, quote from 1Q84
“Please remember: things are not what they seem.”
― Haruki Murakami, quote from 1Q84
“What we call the present is given shape by an accumulation of the past.”
― Haruki Murakami, quote from 1Q84
“Everyone, deep in their hearts, is waiting for the end of the world to come.”
― Haruki Murakami, quote from 1Q84
“They sat on a park bench, held hands, and told each other their stories hour after hour. They were not lonely anymore. They had found and been found by their 100% perfect other. What a wonderful thing it is to find and be found by your 100% perfect other. It's a miracle, a cosmic miracle.”
― Haruki Murakami, quote from 1Q84
“Whenever she felt like crying, she would instead become angry—at someone else or at herself—which meant that it was rare for her to shed tears.”
― Haruki Murakami, quote from 1Q84
Haruki Murakami
Born place: in Kyoto, Japan
Born date January 12, 1949
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“Democracy, liberalism--those are just words on a signpost, she was right about that. But the reality is more like the microflora in your guts. In the West, all your microbes balance each other out, it's taken centuries for you to reach that stage. They all quietly get on with generating hydrogen sulphide and keep their mouths shut. Everything's fine-tuned, like a watch, the total balance and self-regulation of the digestive system, and above it--the corporate media, moistening it all with fresh saliva every day. That kind of organism is called the open society--why the hell should it close down, it can close down anyone else it wants with a couple of air strikes. The question is, how do you arrive at this condition? What they taught us to do was to swallow salmonella with no antibodies to fight it, or other microbes to keep it in check at all. Not surprisingly we developed such a bad case of diarrhea that three hundred billion bucks had drained out before we even began to understand what was going on.”
― Victor Pelevin, quote from The Sacred Book of the Werewolf
“He had always assumed that a time would come in adulthood, a kind of plateau, when he would have learned all the tricks of managing, of simply being. All mail and e-mails answered, all papers in order, books alphabetically on the shelves, clothes and shoes in good repair in the wardrobes, and all his stuff where he could find it, with the past, including its letters and photographs, sorted into boxes and files, the private life settled and serene, accommodation and finances likewise. In all these years this settlement, the calm plateau, had never appeared, and yet he had continued to assume, without reflecting on the matter, that it was just around the next turn, when he would exert himself and reach it, that moment when his life became clear and his mind free, when his grown-up existence could properly begin. But not long after Catriona's birth, about the time he met Darlene, he thought he saw it for the first time: on the day he died he would be wearing unmatching socks, there would be unanswered e-mails, and in the hovel he called home there would still be shirts missing cuff buttons, a malfunctioning light in the hall, and unpaid bills, uncleared attics, dead flies, friends waiting for a reply, and lovers he had not owned up to. Oblivion, the last word in organization, would be his only consolation.”
― Ian McEwan, quote from Solar
“However, I'm here to tell you dear reader that there is always more than meets the eye.”
― Isabella Kruger, quote from Afterlife
“Sex. It’s the biggest sham of all. I mean, your whole life, all you ever hear is how you’re supposed to save yourself for marriage. And how it’s so special. And then you finally do it. And you’re like, that’s it? This is what everyone’s been raving about?”
― Candace Bushnell, quote from Summer and the City
“And the truth is I feel so angry, and the truth is I feel so fucking sad, and the truth is I've felt so fucking hurt for so fucking long and for just as long I've been pretending I'm OK, just to get along, just for, I don't know why, maybe because no one wants to hear about my misery, because they have their own. Well, fuck everybody. Amen.”
― Charlie Kaufman, quote from Synecdoche, New York: The Shooting Script
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True Devotion to Mar...BookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.
We thoughtfully gather quotes from our favorite books, both classic and current, and choose the ones that are most thought-provoking. Each quote represents a book that is interesting, well written and has potential to enhance the reader’s life. We also accept submissions from our visitors and will select the quotes we feel are most appealing to the BookQuoters community.
Founded in 2023, BookQuoters has quickly become a large and vibrant community of people who share an affinity for books. Books are seen by some as a throwback to a previous world; conversely, gleaning the main ideas of a book via a quote or a quick summary is typical of the Information Age but is a habit disdained by some diehard readers. We feel that we have the best of both worlds at BookQuoters; we read books cover-to-cover but offer you some of the highlights. We hope you’ll join us.
