“People who love horror films are people with boring lives... when a really scary movie is over, you're reassured to see that you're still alive and the world still exists as it did before. That's the real reason we have horror films - they act as shock absorbers - and if they disappeared altogether, I bet you'd see a big leap in the number of serial killers. After all, anyone stupid enough to get the idea of murdering people from a movie could get the same idea from watching the news.”
― Ryū Murakami, quote from In the Miso Soup
“... The type of loneliness where you need to keep struggling to accept a situation is fundamentally different than the sort you know you'll get through if you just hang in there”
― Ryū Murakami, quote from In the Miso Soup
“Parents, teachers, government - they all teach you how to live the dreary , deadening life of a slave, but nobody teaches you how to live normally.”
― Ryū Murakami, quote from In the Miso Soup
“All Americans have something lonely about them. I don't know what the reason might be, except maybe that they're all descended from immigrants.”
― Ryū Murakami, quote from In the Miso Soup
“Just before I fell asleep, I had a moment of panic ...”
― Ryū Murakami, quote from In the Miso Soup
“When you're in an extreme situation you tend to avoid facing it by getting caught up in little details. Like a guy who's decided to commit suicide and boards a train only to become obsessed with whether he remembered to lock the door when he left home.”
― Ryū Murakami, quote from In the Miso Soup
“When you're a kid, getting lost isn't just an event or a situation, it's like a career move. You get this thrill of anxiety and fear and a feeling that you've done something that can never be undone.”
― Ryū Murakami, quote from In the Miso Soup
“What makes somebody nice or unpleasant to be around is the way they communicate. When people are fucked up, their communication is fucked up.”
― Ryū Murakami, quote from In the Miso Soup
“That was with me for years--feeling I wasn't myself. And I do think I wasn't my real self then. Of course, I'm not sure there is such a thing as a real self. You could ransack your innards looking for the real you and never find it--slice yourself open and all you'll find is blood and muscle and bone.”
― Ryū Murakami, quote from In the Miso Soup
“And sometimes ignorance is even harder to deal with than deliberate evil.”
― Ryū Murakami, quote from In the Miso Soup
“But what I did sense was an emptiness like a black hole inside of him, and there was no predicting what might emerge from a place like that.”
― Ryū Murakami, quote from In the Miso Soup
“They needed a reason why a little kid would commit murder, someone or something to point the finger at, and I think they were relieved when they hit upon horror movies as the culprit. But there's no reason a child commits murder, just as there's no reason a child gets lost. What would it be - because his parents weren't watching him? That's not a reason, it's just a step in the process.”
― Ryū Murakami, quote from In the Miso Soup
“Very few people of our generation or the next will reach adulthood without experiencing the sort of unhappiness you can't really deal with on your own. We're still in the minority, so the media lump us together as "The Oversensitive Young", or whatever the latest catchphrase is, but eventually that will change.”
― Ryū Murakami, quote from In the Miso Soup
“Lady #1, Maki, had never once given any thought to what was really right for her in her life, simply believing that if she surrounded herself with super-exclusive things, she'd become a super-exclusive person.”
― Ryū Murakami, quote from In the Miso Soup
“I wonder why people you have to meet have to be such liars. They lie as if their lives depended on it.”
― Ryū Murakami, quote from In the Miso Soup
“It's always precisely the sort of smug old wanker you would never ever want to end up like. We don't live the way you tell us to because we're afraid that if we do we'll grow up to be like you, and the thought of that is unbearable. It's alright for you because you'll be dead soon anyway, but we've still got another fifty or sixty years to live in this stinking country.”
― Ryū Murakami, quote from In the Miso Soup
“I remembered reading in a hard-boiled detective novel that if you drink in the same place two nights in a row, the bartender and waiters will remember your face.”
― Ryū Murakami, quote from In the Miso Soup
“He invited me to his apartment in the wee hours one morning and pulled out a set of children's building blocks. It seems he used to ride around and around on the Yamanote Line with them, building castles on the floor of the train.”
― Ryū Murakami, quote from In the Miso Soup
“But why is it that if you imagine a baby who smells of milk, for example, you can't help smiling? Why is there such an agreement around the world about what is or isn't a foul smell? Who decided what smells bad? Is it impossible that somewhere in this world there are people who, if they sat next to a homeless fellow they'd get the urge to snuggle up to him, but if they sat next to a baby they'd get an urge to kill it?”
― Ryū Murakami, quote from In the Miso Soup
“After listening to a lot of these stories, I began to think that American loneliness is a completely different creature from anything we experience in this country, and it made me glad I was born Japanese. The type of loneliness where you need to keep struggling to accept a situation is fundamentally different from the sort you know you'll get through if you just hang in there.”
― Ryū Murakami, quote from In the Miso Soup
“I'm sure we've all experienced really malevolent feelings once or twice in our lives, the desire to kill somebody,say.but there's always a braking mechanism somewhere along the line that stop us.”
― Ryū Murakami, quote from In the Miso Soup
“I wondered if there were planets where it's okay to murder people. I decided there must be, reminding myself that in war, after all, killers are heroes.”
― Ryū Murakami, quote from In the Miso Soup
“Ponekad je mnogo teže izaći na kraj s glupošću nego sa svesnim zlom.”
― Ryū Murakami, quote from In the Miso Soup
“Mislim da je ljudima koji vole horore samo dosadno u životu. Žude za podsticajma, a kada se stvarno jeziv film završi, ponovo si uveren da si živ i da svet još uvek postoji kao i pre, i oni imaju potrebu da se u to iznova uveravaju. To je pravi razlog zašto postoje horor filmovi - oni služe kao prigušivači šoka - i ako nestanu, to će značiti da gubimo jedan od nekoliko načina na koje se nosimo sa anksioznošću koju naša mašta proizvodi. Kladim se da bismo tada bili svedoci velikog porasta broja serijskih i masovnih ubica. Konačno, svako ko je dovoljno glup da iz horor filmova dobije ideju da ubija ljude može istu tu ideju da dobije gledajući vesti, zar ne?”
― Ryū Murakami, quote from In the Miso Soup
“I wasn't sure I knew any longer what was right and what was wrong. It was a very precarious feeling, but it hinted at a sense of liberation like I'd never experienced. Liberation from the countless little hassles of everyday life. It was as if the border between 'me' and 'not me' was dissolving, leaving me in a sort of slush.
I was going somewhere I'd never been before.”
― Ryū Murakami, quote from In the Miso Soup
“Did you know that only a tiny minority of viruses cause illness in humans? No one knows how many viruses there are, but their real role, when you get right down to it, is to aid in mutations, to create diversity among life forms. I've read a lot of books on the subject-when you don't need much sleep you have a lot of time to read-and I can tell you that if it weren't for viruses, mankind would never have evolved on this planet. Some viruses get right inside the DNA and change your genetic code, did you know that? And no one can say for sure that HIV, for example, won't one day prove to have been rewriting our genetic code in a way that's essential to our survival as a race. I'm a man who consciously commits murders and scares the hell out of people and makes them reconsider everything, so I'm definitely malignant, yet I think I play a necessary role in this world.”
― Ryū Murakami, quote from In the Miso Soup
“American loneliness is a completely different creature from anything we experience in this country, and it made me glad I was born japanese.”
― Ryū Murakami, quote from In the Miso Soup
“Sinteen-years -old girls are probably the most sensitive and perceptive group of people in this entire country.”
― Ryū Murakami, quote from In the Miso Soup
“Ona vrsta usamljenosti u kojoj moraš da se boriš kako bi prihvatio situacju iz korena je drugačija od one vrste u kojoj znaš da ćeš isplivati samo ako izdržiš.”
― Ryū Murakami, quote from In the Miso Soup
Ryū Murakami
Born place: in Sasebo, Nagasaki, Japan
Born date February 19, 1952
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