Valli Stone > Valli's Quotes

“We knew exactly what we wanted in each other. And even so, it ended. One day it stopped, as if the film simply slipped off the reel. ”
― Haruki Murakami, Dance Dance Dance

“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, Norwegian Wood

“So that’s how we live our lives. No matter how deep and fatal the
loss, no matter how important the thing that's stolen from us - that's
snatched right out of our hands - even if we are left completely
changed, with only the outer layer of skin from before, we continue to
play out our lives this way, in silence. We draw ever nearer to the
end of our allotted span of time, bidding it farewell as it trails off
behind. Repeating, often adroitly, the endless deeds of the everyday.
Leaving behind a feeling of insurmountable emptiness...
Maybe, in some distant place, everything is already, quietly, lost.
Or at least there exists a silent place where everything can
disappear, melting together in a single, overlapping figure. And as
we live our lives we discover - drawing toward us the thin threads
attached to each - what has been lost. I closed my eyes and tried to
bring to mind as many beautiful lost things as I could. Drawing them
closer, holding on to them. Knowing all the while that their lives
are fleeting.”
― Haruki Murakami, Sputnik Sweetheart

“Each person feels pain in his own way, each has his own scars.”
― Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore

“I’m the kind of person who likes to be by himself. To put a finer point on it, I’m the type of person who doesn’t find it painful to be alone. I find spending an hour or two every day running alone, not speaking to anyone, as well as four or five hours alone at my desk, to be neither difficult nor boring. I’ve had this tendency ever since I was young, when, given a choice, I much preferred reading books on my own or concentrating on listening to music over being with someone else. I could always think of things to do by myself.”
― Haruki Murakami, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running

“I am nothing. I’m like someone who’s been thrown into the ocean at night, floating all alone. I reach out, but no one is there. I call out, but no one answers. I have no connection to anything.”
― Haruki Murakami, 1Q84

“If you can't understand it without an explanation, you can't understand it with an explanation.”
― Haruki Murakami, 1Q84

“In a sense, I'm the one who ruined me: I did it myself.”
― Haruki Murakami, 1Q84

“For a long time, she held a special place in my heart. I kept this special place just for her, like a "Reserved" sign on a quiet corner table in a restaurant. Despite the fact that I was sure I'd never see her again.”
― Haruki Murakami, South of the Border, West of the Sun

“The sense of tragedy - according to Aristotle - comes, ironically enough, not from the protagonist's weak points but from his good qualities. Do you know what I'm getting at? People are drawn deeper into tragedy not by their defects but by their virtues.
...
[But] we accept irony through a device called metaphor. And through that we grow and become deeper human beings.”
― Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore

“I've always done whatever I felt like doing in life. People may try to stop me, and convince me I'm wrong, but I won't change.”
― Haruki Murakami, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running

“You can hide memories, but you can't erase the history that produced them.”
― Haruki Murakami, Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage

“Most people are not looking for provable truths. As you said, truth is often accompanied by intense pain, and almost no one is looking for painful truths. What people need is beautiful, comforting stories that make them feel as if their lives have some meaning. Which is where religion comes from.”
― Haruki Murakami, 1Q84 Book 1

“Things outside you are projections of what's inside you, and what's inside you is a projection of what's outside. So when you step into the labyrinth outside you, at the same time you're stepping into the labyrinth inside.”
― Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore

“As I see it, you are living with something that you keep hidden deep inside. Something heavy. I felt it from the first time I met you. You have a strong gaze, as if you have made up your mind about something. To tell you the truth, I myself carry such things around inside. Heavy things. That is how I can see it in you.”
― Haruki Murakami, 1Q84

“When you come out of the storm, you won’t be the same person who walked in. That’s what this storm’s all about.”
― Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore

“Somewhere in his body--perhaps in the marrow of his bones--he would continue to feel her absence.”
― Haruki Murakami, Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman: 24 Stories

“That's why I like listening to Schubert while I'm driving. Like I said, it's because all his performances are imperfect. A dense, artistic kind of imperfection stimulates your consciousness, keeps you alert. If I listen to some utterly perfect performance of an utterly perfect piece while I'm driving, I might want to close my eyes and die right then and there. But listening to the D major, I can feel the limits of what humans are capable of - that a certain type of perfection can only be realized through a limitless accumulation of the imperfect. And personally I find that encouraging.”
― Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore

“In the world we live in, what we know and what we don't know are like Siamese twins, inseparable, existing in a state of confusion.”
― Haruki Murakami, Sputnik Sweetheart

“Nothing in the real world is as beautiful as the illusions of a person about to lose consciousness.”
― Haruki Murakami, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running

“I wasn't in love with her. And she didn't love me. For me the question of love was irrelevant. What I sought was the sense of being tossed about by some raging, savage force, in the midst of which lay something absolutely crucial. I had no idea what that was. But I wanted to thrust my hand right inside her body and touch it, whatever it was.”
― Haruki Murakami, South of the Border, West of the Sun

“No mistake about it. Ice is cold; roses are red; I'm in love. And this love is about to carry me off somewhere. The current's too overpowering; I don't have any choice. It may very well be a special place, some place I've never seen before. Danger may be lurking there, something that may end up wounding me deeply, fatally. I might end up losing everything. But there's no turning back. I can only go with the flow. Even if it means I'll be burned up, gone forever.”
― Haruki Marukami, Sputnik Sweetheart

“A strange, terrific force unlike anything I've ever experienced is sprouting in my heart, taking root there, growing. Shut up behind my rib cage, my warm heart expands and contracts independent of my will--over and over.”
― Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore

“To know one’s own state is not a simple matter. One cannot look directly at one’s own face with one’s own eyes, for example. One has no choice but to look at one’s reflection in the mirror. Through experience, we come to believe that the image is correct, but that is all.”
― Haruki Murakami, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

“One heart is not connected to another through harmony alone. They are, instead, linked deeply through their wounds. Pain linked to pain, fragility to fragility. There is no silence without a cry of grief, no forgiveness without bloodshed, no acceptance without a passage through acute loss. That is what lies at the root of true harmony.”
― Haruki Murakami, Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage