1Q84 Quotes

“What we call the present is given shape by an accumulation of the past.”
― Haruki Murakami, 1Q84

“They sat on a park bench, held hands, and told each other their stories hour after hour. They were not lonely anymore. They had found and been found by their 100% perfect other. What a wonderful thing it is to find and be found by your 100% perfect other. It's a miracle, a cosmic miracle.”
― Haruki Murakami, 1Q84

“If you never noticed, it never happened.”
― Haruki Murakami, 1Q84 Book 1

“Once you pass a certain age, life becomes nothing more than a process of continual loss. Things that are important to your life begin to slip out of your grasp, one after another, like a come losing teeth. And the only things that come to take their place are worthless imitations. Your physical strength, your hopes, your dreams, your ideals, your convictions, all meaning, or then again, the people you love: one by one, they fade away. Some announce their departure before they leave, while others just disappear all of a sudden without warning one day. And once you lose them you can never get them back. Your search for replacements never goes well. It’s all very painful – as painful as actually being cut with a knife.”
― Haruki Murakami, 1Q84

“Whenever she felt like crying, she would instead become angry—at someone else or at herself—which meant that it was rare for her to shed tears.”
― Haruki Murakami, 1Q84

“The body is not the only target of rape. Violence does not always take a visible form, and not all wounds gush blood.”
― Haruki Murakami, 1Q84

“A person's last moments are an important thing. You can't choose how you're born but you can choose how you die.”
― Haruki Murakami, 1Q84

“Hundreds of butterflies flitted in and out of sight like short-lived punctuation marks in a stream of consciousness without beginning or end.”
― Haruki Murakami, 1Q84

“Once you let yourself grow close to someone, cutting the ties could be painful.”
― Haruki Murakami, 1Q84

“The thing I’m most afraid of is me. Of not knowing what I’m going to do. Of not knowing what I’m doing right now”
― Haruki Murakami, 1Q84

“The things she most wanted to tell him would lose their meaning the moment she put them into words.”
― Haruki Murakami, 1Q84

“Time flows in strange ways on Sundays, and sights become mysteriously distorted.”
― Haruki Murakami, 1Q84

“Things can be seen better in the darkness," he said, as if he had just seen into her mind. "But the longer you spend in the dark, the harder it becomes to return to the world aboveground where the light is”
― Haruki Murakami, 1Q84

“...most people in the world don't really use their brains to think. And people who don't think are the ones who don't listen to others.”
― Haruki Murakami, 1Q84

“According to Chekhov," Tamaru said, rising from his chair, "once a gun appears in a story, it has to be fired."
"Meaning what?"
"Meaning, don't bring unnecessary props into a story. If a pistol appears, it has to be fired at some point. Chekhov liked to write stories that did away with all useless ornamentation.”
― Haruki Murakami, 1Q84

“Our memory is made up of our individual memories and our collective memories. The two are intimately linked. And history is our collective memory. If our collective memory is taken from us - is rewritten - we lose the ability to sustain our true selves.”
― Haruki Murakami, 1Q84

“In this world, there is no absolute good, no absolute evil," the man said. "Good and evil are not fixed, stable entities, but are continually trading places. A good may be transformed into an evil in the next second. And vice versa. Such was the way of the world that Dostoevsky depicted in The Brothers Karamazov. The most important thing is to maintain the balance between the constantly moving good and evil. If you lean too much in either direction, it becomes difficult to maintain actual morals. Indeed, balance itself is the good.”
― Haruki Murakami, 1Q84

“You said you're going far away," Tamaru said. "How far away are we talking about?"

"It's a distance that can't be measured."

"Like the distance that separates one person's heart from another's.”
― Haruki Murakami, 1Q84

“Reality was utterly coolheaded and utterly lonely.”
― Haruki Murakami, 1Q84 Book 1

“There was just one moon. That familiar, yellow, solitary moon. The same moon that silently floated over fields of pampas grass, the moon that rose--a gleaming, round saucer--over the calm surface of lakes, that tranquilly beamed down on the rooftops of fast-asleep houses. The same moon that brought the high tide to shore, that softly shone on the fur of animals and enveloped and protected travelers at night. The moon that, as a crescent, shaved slivers from the soul--or, as a new moon, silently bathed the earth in its own loneliness. THAT moon.”
― Haruki Murakami, 1Q84

“I'm all alone, but I'm not lonely.”
― Haruki Murakami, 1Q84

“It's the same with menus and men and just about anything else: we think we're choosing things for ourselves, but in fact we may not be choosing anything. It could be that everthing's being decided in advance and we pretend we're making choices. Free will may be an illusion. I often think that.”
― Haruki Murakami, 1Q84

“Even if you managed to escape from one cage, weren't you just in another, larger one?”
― Haruki Murakami, 1Q84

“Where there is light, there must be shadow, and where there is shadow there must be light. There is no shadow without light and no light without shadow. Karl Jung said this about 'the Shadow' in one of his books: 'It is as evil as we are positive... the more desperately we try to be good and wonderful and perfect, the more the Shadow develops a definite will to be black and evil and destructive... The fact is that if one tries beyond one's capacity to be perfect, the shadow descends to hell and becomes the devil. For it is just as sinful from the standpoint of nature and of truth to be above oneself as to be below oneself.”
― Haruki Murakami, 1Q84

“I was in my house, alone in the living room, anxious about you, watching the flashes of lightning. And a flash of lightning lit up this truth for me, right in front of my eye. That night i lost you, I lost something inside me. Or perhaps several things. Something central to my existence, the very support for who I am as a person”
― Haruki Murakami, 1Q84

“Where there is light, there must be shadow, where there is shadow there must be light. There is no shadow without light and no light without shadow.... We do not know if the so-called Little People are good or evil. This is, in a sense, something that surpasses our understanding and our definitions. We have lived with them since long, long ago-- from a time before good and evil even existed, when people's minds were still benighted.”
― Haruki Murakami, 1Q84

“There is nothing in this world that never takes a step outside a person's heart.”
― Haruki Murakami, 1Q84

“Beyond the window, some kind of small, black thing shot across the sky. A bird, possibly. Or it might have been someone's soul being blown to the far side of the world.”
― Haruki Murakami, 1Q84

“This may be the most important proposition revealed by history: 'At the time, no one knew what was coming.”
― Haruki Murakami, 1Q84

“Don't let appearances fool you. There's always only one reality!”
― Haruki Murakami, 1Q84