"Haruki Murakami"の名言

Time weighs down on you like an old, ambiguous dream. You keep on moving, trying to sleep through it. But even if you go to the ends of the earth, you won't be able to escape it. Still, you have to go there- to the edge of the world. There's something you can't do unless you get there.

According to Aristophanes in Plato's The Banquet, in the ancient world of legend there were three types of people. In ancient times people weren't simply male or female, but one of three types : male/male, male/female or female/female. In other words, each person was made out of the components of two people. Everyone was happy with this arrangment and never really gave it much thought. But then God took a knife and cut everyone in half, right down the middle. So after that the world was divided just into male and female, the upshot being that people spend their time running around trying to locate their missing half.

I'm often asked what I think about as I run. Usually the people who ask this have never run long distances themselves. I always ponder the question. What exactly do I think about when I'm running? I don't have a clue.

A gentleman is someone who does not what he wants to do, but what he should do.

It's easy to forget things you don't need anymore.

When you are used to the kind of life -of never getting anything you want- you stop knowing what it is you want.

When someone is trying very hard to get something, they don't. And when they're running away from something as hard as they can, it usually catches up with them.

I do feel that I’ve managed to make something I could maybe call my world…over time…little by little. And when I’m inside it, to some extent, I feel kind of relieved. But the very fact I felt I had to make such a world probably means that I’m a weak person, that I bruise easily, don’t you think? And in the eyes of society at large, that world of mine is a puny little thing. It’s like a cardboard house: a puff of wind might carry it off somewhere.

Snow floated down every once in a while, but it was frail snow, like a memory fading into the distance.

The darkness behind my closed eyelids was like the cloud-covered sky, but the gray was somewhat deeper. Every few minutes, someone would come and paint over the gray with a different-textured gray - one with a touch of gold or green or red. I was impressed with the variety of grays that existed. Human beings were so strange. All you had to do was sit still for ten minutes, and you could see this amazing variety of grays.

A revelation leaps over the borders of the everyday. A life without revelation is no life at all. What you need to do is move from reason that ‘observes’ to reason that ‘acts’. That’s what critical.

Latter-day capitalism. Like it or not, it's the society we live in. Even the standard of right and wrong has been subdivided, made sophisticated. Within good, there's fashionable good and unfashionable good, and ditto for bad. Within fashionable good, there's formal and then there's casual; there's hip, there's cool, there's trendy, there's snobbish. Mix 'n' match. Like pulling on a Missoni sweater over Trussardi slacks and Pollini shoes, you can now enjoy hybrid styles of morality. It's the way of the world -- philosophy starting to look more and more like business administration.

If people lived forever — if they never got any older — if they could just go on living in this world, never dying, always healthy — do you think they'd bother to think hard about things, the way we're doing now? I mean, we think about just about everything, more or less — philosophy, psychology, logic. Religion. Literature. I kinda think, if there were no such thing as death, that complicated thoughts and ideas like that would never come into the world.

If you think God’s there, He is. If you don’t, He isn’t. And if that’s what God’s like, I wouldn’t worry about it.

In the name of God, they stole her time and her freedom, putting shackles on her heart. They preached about God's kindness, but preached twice as much about his wrath and intolerance.

But hell, you've gotta work with what you've got.

Los pensamientos que acuden a mi mente cuando corro se parecen a las nubes del cielo. Nubes de diversas formas y tamaños. Nubes que vienen y se van. Pero el cielo siempre es el cielo. Las nubes son sólo meras invitadas. Algo que pasa de largo y se dispersa. Y sólo queda el cielo. El cielo es algo que, al tiempo que existe, no existe. Algo material y a la vez, inmaterial. Y a nosotros no nos queda sino aceptar ka existencia de ese inmenso recipiente tal cual es e intentar ir asimilándolo.

This is one more piece of advice I have for you: don't get impatient. Even if things are so tangled up you can't do anything, don't get desperate or blow a fuse and start yanking on one particular thread before it's ready to come undone. You have to realize it's going to be a long process and that you'll work on things slowly, one at a time.

Loving another person is a wonderful thing, and if that love is sincere, no one ends up tossed into a labyrinth. You have to have more faith in yourself.

It's easy to talk big, but the important thing is whether or not you clean up the shit.