“If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking.”
― Haruki Murakami, quote from Norvegų giria
“What happens when people open their hearts?"
"They get better.”
― Haruki Murakami, quote from Norvegų giria
“Nobody likes being alone that much. I don't go out of my way to make friends, that's all. It just leads to disappointment. ”
― Haruki Murakami, quote from Norvegų giria
“Don't feel sorry for yourself. Only assholes do that.”
― Haruki Murakami, quote from Norvegų giria
“But who can say what's best? That's why you need to grab whatever chance you have of happiness where you find it, and not worry about other people too much. My experience tells me that we get no more than two or three such chances in a life time, and if we let them go, we regret it for the rest of our lives.”
― Haruki Murakami, quote from Norvegų giria
“I want you always to remember me. Will you remember that I existed, and that I stood next to you here like this?”
― Haruki Murakami, quote from Norvegų giria
“I was always hungry for love. Just once, I wanted to know what it was like to get my fill of it -- to be fed so much love I couldn't take any more. Just once. ”
― Haruki Murakami, quote from Norvegų giria
“Despite your best efforts, people are going to be hurt when it's time for them to be hurt.”
― Haruki Murakami, quote from Norvegų giria
“Letters are just pieces of paper," I said. "Burn them, and what stays in your heart will stay; keep them, and what vanishes will vanish.”
― Haruki Murakami, quote from Norvegų giria
“I have a million things to talk to you about. All I want in this world is you. I want to see you and talk. I want the two of us to begin everything from the beginning.”
― Haruki Murakami, quote from Norvegų giria
“Only the Dead stay seventeen forever.”
― Haruki Murakami, quote from Norvegų giria
“What a terrible thing it is to wound someone you really care for and to do it so unconsciously.”
― Haruki Murakami, quote from Norvegų giria
“I really like you, Midori. A lot.”
“How much is a lot?”
“Like a spring bear,” I said.
“A spring bear?” Midori looked up again. “What’s that all about? A spring bear.”
“You’re walking through a field all by yourself one day in spring, and this sweet little bear cub with velvet fur and shiny little eyes comes walking along. And he says to you, “Hi, there, little lady. Want to tumble with me?’ So you and the bear cub spend the whole day in each other’s arms, tumbling down this clover-covered hill. Nice, huh?”
“Yeah. Really nice.”
“That’s how much I like you.”
― Haruki Murakami, quote from Norvegų giria
“If you're in pitch blackness, all you can do is sit tight until your eyes get used to the dark”
― Haruki Murakami, quote from Norvegų giria
“What makes us the most normal," said Reiko, "is knowing that we're not normal.”
― Haruki Murakami, quote from Norvegų giria
“I don't care what you do to me, but I don't want you to hurt me. I've had enough hurt already in my life. More than enough. Now I want to be happy.”
― Haruki Murakami, quote from Norvegų giria
“I didn't have much to say to anybody but kept to myself and my books. With my eyes closed, I would touch a familiar book and draw it's fragrance deep inside me. This was enough to make me happy.”
― Haruki Murakami, quote from Norvegų giria
“Not that we were incompatible: we just had nothing to talk about.”
― Haruki Murakami, quote from Norvegų giria
“So what’s wrong if there happens to be one guy in the world who enjoys trying to understand you?”
― Haruki Murakami, quote from Norvegų giria
“Memory is a funny thing. When I was in the scene, I hardly paid it any mind. I never stopped to think of it as something that would make a lasting impression, certainly never imagined that eighteen years later I would recall it in such detail. I didn't give a damn about the scenery that day. I was thinking about myself. I was thinking about the beautiful girl walking next to me. I was thinking about the two of us together, and then about myself again. It was the age, that time of life when every sight, every feeling, every thought came back, like a boomerang, to me. And worse, I was in love. Love with complications. The scenery was the last thing on my mind.”
― Haruki Murakami, quote from Norvegų giria
“So I made up my mind I was going to find someone who would love me unconditionally three hundred and sixty-five days a year.
Watanabe: Wow, and did your search pay off?
M: That's the hard part. I guess I've been waiting so long I'm looking for perfection. That makes it tough.”
― Haruki Murakami, quote from Norvegų giria
“She's letting out her feelings. The scary thing is not being able to do that. When your feelings build up and harden and die inside, then you're in big trouble.”
― Haruki Murakami, quote from Norvegų giria
“Something inside me had dropped away, and nothing came in to fill the cavern.”
― Haruki Murakami, quote from Norvegų giria
“I made up my mind I was going to find someone who would love me unconditionally three hundred and sixty five days a year, I was still in elementary school at the time - fifth or sixth grade - but I made up my mind once and for all.”
“Wow,” I said. “Did the search pay off?”
“That’s the hard part,” said Midori. She watched the rising smoke for a while, thinking. “I guess I’ve been waiting so long I’m looking for perfection. That makes it tough.”
“Waiting for the perfect love?”
“No, even I know better than that. I’m looking for selfishness. Perfect selfishness. Like, say I tell you I want to eat strawberry shortcake. And you stop everything you’re doing and run out and buy it for me. And you come back out of breath and get down on your knees and hold this strawberry shortcake out to me. And I say I don’t want it anymore and throw it out the window. That’s what I’m looking for.”
“I’m not sure that has anything to do with love,” I said with some amazement.
“It does,” she said. “You just don’t know it. There are time in a girl’s life when things like that are incredibly important.”
“Things like throwing strawberry shortcake out the window?”
“Exactly. And when I do it, I want the man to apologize to me. “Now I see, Midori. What a fool I have been! I should have known that you would lose your desire for strawberry shortcake. I have all the intelligence and sensitivity of a piece of donkey shit. To make it up to you, I’ll go out and buy you something else. What would you like? Chocolate Mousse? Cheesecake?”
“So then what?”
“So then I’d give him all the love he deserves for what he’s done.”
“Sounds crazy to me.”
“Well, to me, that’s what love is…”
― Haruki Murakami, quote from Norvegų giria
“It's because of you when I'm in bed in the morning that I can wind my spring and tell myself I have to live another good day.”
― Haruki Murakami, quote from Norvegų giria
“Which is why I am writing this book. To think. To understand. It just happens to be the way I'm made. I have to write things down to feel I fully comprehend them.”
― Haruki Murakami, quote from Norvegų giria
“لا أحد يحب العزلة. أنا فقط أكره الخيبة”
― Haruki Murakami, quote from Norvegų giria
“Things like that happen all the time in this great big world of ours. It's like taking a boat out on a beautiful lake on a beautiful day and thinking both the sky and the lake are beautiful. So stop eating yourself up alive. Things will go where they're supposed to go if you just let them take their natural course.”
― Haruki Murakami, quote from Norvegų giria
Haruki Murakami
Born place: in Kyoto, Japan
Born date January 12, 1949
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“If you are going to start psychoanalyzing me, Legna, just stop it right now,” Noah warned her.
“You have had my undivided love and attention practically since the day I was born, Noah. Has it never occurred to you that you are simply unwilling to share me with anyone else? You joke about it, but there are reasons why you are not interested in finding a companion of your own. Why should you? You have a perfectly kept home, a beautiful hostess to manage your social affairs, and she is pretty much emotionally maintenance free. I give you completely unconditional love, respect, and admiration. I keep you company when there are so many around, but none are really close enough to your heart to safely be a King’s confidant. There is only one thing I cannot do for you, and I already know you have your ways of obtaining that.”
“Legna,” he protested, his face flushing. “That is not true.”
“Which part?” she countered, raising a single brow.
“I . . .” He hesitated, looking away from her penetrating gaze, realizing that she saw so much more than he had ever given her credit for. “Well, for one, the rafters of my ‘perfectly kept home’ are full of cobwebs,” he said sheepishly.
Legna suddenly, gratefully, found herself laughing. It was a short burst of amusement that instantly defused the painful tension between them.
“As if it would kill you to spare a thought to giving them a two-second toasting and getting rid of them yourself?”
― Jacquelyn Frank, quote from Gideon
“You know that all dragons collect treasure of one sort or another, correct?" he asked, looking straight at Andie.
"That's The Tradition, of course," she replied. "I don't know how you could possibly escape that particular compulsion."
"Well, our family does that, too, of course," he said. "But our treasure is a bit different. We're librarians."
He held up his fore-claws and she saw that they had been blunted; looking closer, she saw that what was covering the talons were sheaths of some sort with blunt tips. Well, if they were librarians... they'd have to keep from damaging the books, wouldn't they?
"Librarians," she said aloud, then grinned as she got it. "Good gods. You are Bookwyrms, aren't you?"
Gina stared at her a moment, then groaned as she got the pun. The Tradition loved puns.”
― Mercedes Lackey, quote from One Good Knight
“If I had to guess, nephew, I would surmise that you are not in direct trouble as such. However, I will confess to the distinct and unsettling feeling that very large, very ponderous and most momentous wheels have been set in motion. When that happens I believe the lessons of history tend to indicate that it is best not to be in their way. Even without meaning harm, the workings and progress of such wheels are on a scale which inevitably reduces the worth of individual lives to an irrelevance at best.”
― Iain M. Banks, quote from The Algebraist
“He not only had the gift of “reading” men and women, of seeing into their hearts, he also had the gift of putting himself in their place, of not just seeing what they felt but of feeling what they felt, almost as if what had happened to them had happened to him, too.”
― Robert A. Caro, quote from Master of the Senate
“Brutus, a young man, over the fleet and those Gallic vessels which he had ordered to be furnished by the Pictones and the Santoni, and the other provinces which remained at peace; and commands him to proceed towards the Veneti, as soon as he could. He himself hastens thither with the land forces.”
― Gaius Julius Caesar, quote from The Conquest of Gaul
Carrier of the Mark
Bewitching
The Dead of Night
Sometimes Never
Babe in Boyland
Shadowhunters and Do...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.
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