48 quotes
Numbers aren’t the important thing … what matters is deciding in your heart to accept another person completely. When you do that, it is always the first time and the last.
If you're in pitch blackness, all you can do is sit tight until your eyes get used to the dark.
Norwegian Wood (1987)
Her pubic hair grew like a patch of grass that had been trampled by a passing army.
Even castles in the sky can do with a fresh coat of paint.
"Between a high, solid wall and an egg that breaks against it, I will always stand on the side of the egg."
Jerusalem Prize Acceptance Address (2009)
"You got to know your limits. Once is enough, but you got to learn. A little caution never hurt anyone. A good woodsman has only one scar on him. No more, no less."
Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World (1985)
But I didn't understand then. That I could hurt somebody so badly she would never recover. That a person can, just by living, damage another human being beyond repair.
Her long hair is loosely tied back, her face very refined and intelligent-looking, with beautiful eyes and a shadowy smile playing over her lips, a smile whose sense of completeness is indescribable.
Once again, I was confused. It felt like bits of reality and unreality were randomly changing places.
Even chance meetings are the result of karma...Things in life are fated by our previous lives. That even in the smallest events there’s no such thing as coincidence.
Whether you cut it off
or someone else cuts it off
if you put your neck on the stone pillow
believe it—you will turn to dust.
Losing you is most difficult for me, but the nature of my love for you is what matters. If it distorts into half-truth, then perhaps it is better not to love you. I must keep my mind but loose you.
Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World (1985)
As I already explained, I don't have any form. I'm a conceptual metaphysical object.
Kindness and a caring mind are two separate qualities. Kindness is manners. It is superficial custom, an acquired practice. Not so the mind. The mind is deeper, stronger, and, I believe, it is far more inconstant.
Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World (1985)
Grammar is like the air: someone higher up might try to set rules for its use, but people won't necessarily follow them.
The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (1994)
You can hide memories, but you can't erase the history that produced them.
Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage (2013)
No matter how much time passes, no matter what takes place in the interim, there are some things we can never assign to oblivion, memories we can never rub away.
Genius or fool, you don't live in the world alone. You can hide underground or you can build a wall around yourself, but somebody's going to come along and screw up the works.
Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World (1985)
Ever since time began (when was that, I wonder?), it's been moving ever forward without a moment's rest. And one of the privileges given to those who've avoided dying young is the blessed right to grow old.
What I Talk about When I Talk about Running (2009)
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.
Norwegian Wood (1987)