Quotes from A Wild Sheep Chase

“Most everything you think you know about me is nothing more than memories.”
― Haruki Murakami, quote from A Wild Sheep Chase

“Body cells replace themselves every month. Even at this very moment. Most everything you think you know about me is nothing more than memories.”
― Haruki Murakami, quote from A Wild Sheep Chase

“Sometimes I get real lonely sleeping with you.”
― Haruki Murakami, quote from A Wild Sheep Chase

“The light of morning decomposes everything.”
― Haruki Murakami, quote from A Wild Sheep Chase

“I don't know, there's something about you. Say there's an hourglass: the sand's about to run out. Someone like you can always be counted on to turn the thing over.”
― Haruki Murakami, quote from A Wild Sheep Chase

“Some things are forgotten, some things disappear, some things die.”
― Haruki Murakami, quote from A Wild Sheep Chase

“Whether you take the doughnut hole as a blank space or as an entity unto itself is a purely metaphysical question and does not affect the taste of the doughnut one bit.”
― Haruki Murakami, quote from A Wild Sheep Chase

“I guess I felt attached to my weakness. My pain and suffering too. Summer light, the smell of a breeze, the sound of cicadas - if I like these things, why should I apologize?”
― Haruki Murakami, quote from A Wild Sheep Chase

“Whenever I meet people for the first time, I get them to talk for ten minutes. Then I size them up from the exact opposite perspective of all they’ve told me. Do you think that’s crazy?
“No,” I said, shaking my head, “I’d guess your method works quite well.”
― Haruki Murakami, quote from A Wild Sheep Chase

“My biggest fault is that the faults I was born with grow bigger each year.”
― Haruki Murakami, quote from A Wild Sheep Chase

“Generally, people who are good at writing letters have no need to write letters. They've got plenty of life to lead inside their own context.”
― Haruki Murakami, quote from A Wild Sheep Chase

“I get irritated, I get upset. Especially when I'm in a hurry. But I see it all as part of our training. To get irritated is to lose our way in life.”
― Haruki Murakami, quote from A Wild Sheep Chase

“I was twenty-one at the time, about to turn twenty-two. No prospect of graduating soon, and yet no reason to quit school. Caught in the most curiously depressing circumstances. For months I'd been stuck, unable to take one step in any new direction. The world kept moving on; I alone was at a standstill. In the autumn, everything took on a desolate cast, the colors swiftly fading before my eyes. The sunlight, the smell of the grass, the faintest patter of rain, everything got on my nerves.”
― Haruki Murakami, quote from A Wild Sheep Chase

“Time really is one big continuous cloth, no? We habitually cut out pieces of time to fit us, so we tend to fool ourselves into thinking that time is our size, but it really goes on and on.”
― Haruki Murakami, quote from A Wild Sheep Chase

“A friend to kill time is a friend sublime.”
― Haruki Murakami, quote from A Wild Sheep Chase

“Age certainly hadn't conferred any smarts on me. Character maybe, but mediocrity is a constant, as one Russian writer put it. Russian writers have a way with aphorisms. They probably spend all winter thinking them up.”
― Haruki Murakami, quote from A Wild Sheep Chase

“There are symbolic dreams-- dreams that symbolize some reality. Then there are symbolic realities -- realities that symbolize a dream. Symbols are what you might call the honorary town councillors of the worm universe. In the worm universe, there is nothing unusual about a dairy cow seeking a pair of pliers. A cow is bound to get her pliers sometime. It has nothing to do with me.”
― Haruki Murakami, quote from A Wild Sheep Chase

“It is cognition that is the fantasy.... Everything I tell you now is mere words. Arrange them and rearrange them as I might, I will never be able to explain to you the form of Will... My explanation would only show the correlation between myself and that Will by means of a correlation on the verbal level. The negation of cognition thus correlates to the negation of language. For when those two pillars of Western humanism, individual cognition and evolutionary continuity, lose their meaning, language loses meaning. Existence ceases for the individuum as we know it, and all becomes chaos. You cease to be a unique entity unto yourself, but exist simply as chaos. And not just the chaos that is you; your chaos is also my chaos. To wit, existence is communication, and communication, existence.”
― Haruki Murakami, quote from A Wild Sheep Chase

“One of these days they'll be making a film where the whole human race gets wiped out in a nuclear war, but everything works out in the end. ”
― Haruki Murakami, quote from A Wild Sheep Chase

“I don't really know if it's the right thing to do, making new life. Kids grow up, generations take their place. What does it all come to? More hills bulldozed and more ocean fronts filled in? Faster cars and more cats run over? Who needs it?”
― Haruki Murakami, quote from A Wild Sheep Chase

“I was feeling lonely without her, but the fact that I could feel lonely at all was consolation. Loneliness wasn't such a bad feeling. It was like the stillness of the pin oak after the little birds had flown off.”
― Haruki Murakami, quote from A Wild Sheep Chase

“Mountains, according to the angle of view, the season, the time of day, the beholder's frame of mind, or any one thing, can effectively change their appearance. Thus, it is essential to recognize that we can never know more than one side, one small aspect of a mountain.”
― Haruki Murakami, quote from A Wild Sheep Chase

“The song is over. But the melody lingers on.”
― Haruki Murakami, quote from A Wild Sheep Chase

“Sheep hurt my father, and through my father, sheep have also hurt me.”
― Haruki Murakami, quote from A Wild Sheep Chase

“As long as I stared at the clock, at least the world remained in motion. Not a very consequential world, but in motion nonetheless. And as long as I knew the world was still in motion, I knew I existed. Not a very consequential existence, but an existence nonetheless. It struck me as wanting that someone should confirm his own existence only by the hands of an electric wall clock. There had to be a more cognitive means of confirmation. But try as I might, nothing less facile came to mind.”
― Haruki Murakami, quote from A Wild Sheep Chase

“People can generally be classified into two groups: the mediocre realists and the mediocre dreamers. You clearly belong to the latter. Your fate is and will always be the fate of a dreamer.”
― Haruki Murakami, quote from A Wild Sheep Chase

“Everybody has some one thing they do not want to lose," began the man. "You included. And we are professionals at finding out that very thing. Humans by necessity must have a midway point between their desires and their pride. Just as all objects must have a center of gravity. This is something we can pinpoint. Only when it is gone do people realize it even existed.”
― Haruki Murakami, quote from A Wild Sheep Chase

“I'd made it back to the land of the living. No matter how boring or mediocre a world it might be, this was it.”
― Haruki Murakami, quote from A Wild Sheep Chase

“It seems to me, though, that you always understand very well what I can't say very well. Trouble is I end up being even worse at saying things well.”
― Haruki Murakami, quote from A Wild Sheep Chase

“Most everything you think you know about me is nothing more than memories”
― Haruki Murakami, quote from A Wild Sheep Chase

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“SIX MONTHS AGO A FRIEND WAS ANGRY WITH ME and I with her. I had written about something someone said many years ago, but it was she who heard the words, not me, a fact I had completely forgotten. Her experience was precious, and she accused me of stealing her memory. Not only that, but what she remembered with grief I had somehow transmuted to gratitude, so besides stealing her memory, I also got it wrong. We argued, but there was no meeting place. For days the same questions went through my head. Is memory property? If two people remember something differently is one of them wrong? Wasn’t my memory of a memory also real? There were no solid answers, just winding paths I went round and round on. I thought of nothing else; a chasm had opened between me and my friend.”
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