1Q84 Quotes

“Fuka-Eri started to offer an opinion on the matter but then had second thoughts and stopped. Her opinion, unvoiced, snack back into the place it had originated from - a deep, dark, unknown place.”
― Haruki Murakami, 1Q84

“Several possibilities came to mind.

1. She was living in a suburb of the city of Utashinai on Hokkaido.

2. She had married and changed her name to 'Ito.'

3. She kept her number unlisted to protect her privacy.

4. She had died in the spring two years earlier from a virulent influenza.

There must have been any number of possibilities beside these.”
― Haruki Murakami, 1Q84

“Cooking was not a chore for Tengo. He always used it as a time to think - about everyday problems, about math problems, about his writing, or about metaphysical propositions. He could think in a more orderly fashion while standing in the kitchen and moving his hands than while doing nothing.”
― Haruki Murakami, 1Q84

“Aomame tried her best to keep her mind clear of any thoughts, but it was impossible not to think of anything. Nature abhors a vacuum.”
― Haruki Murakami, 1Q84

“Ushikawa preferred a world where smells and pain still existed, even if smells and pain were unendurable.”
― Haruki Murakami, 1Q84

“There were three thin wrinkles at her neckline, sharply etched, like notches on the road of life. Or maybe they were marks to commemorate when three wishes had come true - though Ushikawa had serious doubt that this had ever happened.”
― Haruki Murakami, 1Q84

“All women have a right to give birth. We have to protect that right as much as we can.”
― Haruki Murakami, 1Q84

“Ushikawa's appearance made him stand out. He did not have the sort of looks suited for stakeouts or tailing people. As much as he might try to lose himself in a crowd, he was inconspicuous as a centipede in a cup of yogurt”
― Haruki Murakami, 1Q84

“When that girl left, she left behind this void. No, maybe not. Maybe she just showed me something that was already there, inside me.”
― Haruki Murakami, 1Q84

“The pistol against her back was as hard and cold as death, and the feeling soothed her.”
― Haruki Murakami, 1Q84

“art and every inquiry, and similarly every action and pursuit, is thought to aim at some good; and for this reason the good has rightly been declared to be that at which all things aim.’ ”
― Haruki Murakami, 1Q84

“La violenza non assume soltanto forme visibili, e non sempre dalle ferite scorre il sangue.”
― Haruki Murakami, 1Q84 Book 1

“Una speranza simile a una sorgente di calore piccola, ma preziosa, che avrebbe scaldato il loro cuore. Un’esile fiamma che le mani avrebbero circondato per proteggerla dal vento. Per evitare che le violente raffiche della realtà la spegnessero.”
― Haruki Murakami, 1Q84

“THIS IS JUST THE BEGINNING OF SOMETHING”
― Haruki Murakami, 1Q84

“That was her entire dinner. It was a simple meal, but ideal for preventing constipation. Constipation was one of the things she hated most in the world, on par with despicable men who commit domestic violence and narrow-minded religious fundamentalists.”
― Haruki Murakami, 1Q84

“Generally speaking, there was no other way for a woman to take down a bigger, stronger man one-on-one. This was Aomame’s unshakable belief. That part of the body was the weakest point attached to—or, rather, hanging from—the creature known as man, and most of the time, it was not effectively defended. Not to take advantage of that fact was out of the question. As a woman, Aomame had no concrete idea how much it hurt to suffer a hard kick in the balls, though judging from the reactions and facial expressions of men she had kicked, she could at least imagine it. Not even the strongest or toughest man, it seemed, could bear the pain and the major loss of self-respect that accompanied it.”
― Haruki Murakami, 1Q84

“The bar was meant to look like a place where Hemingway might have hung out in the Bahamas. A stuffed swordfish hung on the wall, and fishing nets dangled from the ceiling. There were lots of photographs of people posing with giant fish they had caught, and there was a portrait of Hemingway. Happy Papa Hemingway. The people who came here were apparently not concerned that the author later suffered from alcoholism and killed himself with a hunting rifle.”
― Haruki Murakami, 1Q84

“Unsure where she was to find a purpose or meaning to her life, she passed one formless day after another.”
― Haruki Murakami, 1Q84

“Nascem em algum lugar, buscam tranquilamente apenas o mínimo e o necessário e logo desaparecem. Possivelmente, vão para um outro mundo, diferente do nosso.”
― Haruki Murakami, 1Q84 - Livro 1

“Quando se faz algo incomum, as cenas cotidianas se tornam um pouco diferentes do normal. Mas não se deixe enganar pelas aparências. A realidade é sempre única.”
― Haruki Murakami, 1Q84 - Livro 1

“As dangerous as Komatsu’s plan might be, he could not possibly stop rewriting the novella at this point. He might have been able to give up on the idea before he started working on it, but that was out of the question now. He was up to his neck in it. He was breathing the air of its world, adapting to its gravity. The story’s essence had permeated every part of him, to the walls of his viscera. Now the story was begging him to rework it: he could feel it pleading with him for help. This was something that only Tengo could do. It was a job well worth doing, a job he simply had to do.”
― 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

“his job was to bring that truth to light. It wouldn’t be easy. The place was under heavy guard, with professionals involved. Yakuza? Perhaps. Businessmen, those involved in real estate in particular, are often involved in secret negotiations with yakuza. When the going gets rough, the yakuza get called in. It was possible the old dowager might be making use of their influence. But Ushikawa wasn’t very certain of this—the old dowager was too well bred to deal with people like them. Also, it was hard to imagine that she would use yakuza to protect women who were victims of domestic violence. Probably she had her own security apparatus in place, one that she paid for herself. Her own personal system she had refined. It would cost her, but then, she wasn’t hurting for funds. And this system of hers might employ violence when there was a perceived need. If Ushikawa’s hypothesis was correct, then Aomame must have gone into hiding somewhere far away, with the aid of the old dowager. They would have carefully erased any trail, given her a new identity and a new name, possibly even a new face. If that was the case, then it would be impossible for Ushikawa’s painstaking little private investigation to track her down. At this point the only thing to do was to try to learn more about the dowager. His hope was that he would run across a seam that would lead him to discover something”
― Haruki Murakami, 1Q84

“This was always the problem when talking to Fuka-Eri. All roads inevitably gave out.”
― Haruki Murakami, 1Q84

“Blurring the line between possible and impossible, linear and non-linear time, fiction and reality, fate and free will, 1Q84 is both a metaphysical mind-teaser and a fast-paced thriller where the stakes for Tengo and Aomame couldn’t be any higher. Murakami’s most ambitious novel to date, 1Q84 is also an extraordinary love story, a story about the power of a single moment of deep connection to transcend time and space—and justify even the greatest of risks.”
― Haruki Murakami, 1Q84

“Sex with a married woman ten years his senior was stress free and fulfilling, because it couldn't lead to anything”
― Haruki Murakami, 1Q84

“It was simply one of those things that remain as an “exceptional but interesting” episode in life.”
― Haruki Murakami, 1Q84

“She quietly stretched out a hand, and Tengo took it. The two of them stood there, side by side, as one, wordlessly watching the moon over the buildings. Until the newly risen sun shone upon it, robbing it of its nighttime brilliance. Until it was nothing more than a gray paper moon, hanging in the sky.”
― Haruki Murakami, 1Q84

“I've had that kind of experience myself: I'm looking at a map and I see someplace that makes me think, 'I absolutely have to go to this place, no matter what'. And most of the time, for some reason, the place is far away and hard to get to. I feel this overwhelming desire to know what kind of scenerybthe place has, or what people are doing there. It's like measles - you can't show other people exactly where the passion comes from. It's curiosity in the purest sense. An inexplicable inspiration.”
― Haruki Murakami, 1Q84

“She took her coat off as if it had only now occurred to her to do so. She emerged from it like an insect sloughing off its skin.”
― Haruki Murakami, 1Q84