“If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking.”
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<p><b>'A masterly novel' <i>New York Times</i></b> <p><b>'Such is the exquisite, gossamer construction of Murakami's writing that everything he chooses to describe trembles with symbolic possibility' </b><b><i>Guardian</i></b> <p><b>Read the haunting love story that turned Murakami into a literary superstar.</b> <p>When he hears her favourite Beatles song, Toru Watanabe recalls his first love Naoko, the girlfriend of his best friend Kizuki. Immediately he is transported back almost twenty years to his student days in Tokyo, adrift in a world of uneasy friendships, casual sex, passion, loss and desire - to a time when an impetuous young woman called Midori marches into his life and he has to choose between the future and the past. <p>*<b>Murakami's new book Novelist as a Vocation is available now</b>* <p><b>'Evocative, entertaining, sexy and funny; but then Murakami is one of the best writers around' <i>Time Out</i></b> <p><b>'Poignant, romantic and hopeless, it beautifully encapsulates the heartbreak and loss of faith' </b><b><i>Sunday Times</i> <p>'This book is undeniably hip, full of student uprisings, free love, booze and 1960s pop, it's also genuinely emotionally engaging, and describes the highs of adolescence as well as the lows' <i>Independent on Sunday</i></b></p>
Quotes
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Haruki Murakami
Canonical work source
“If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking.”
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“Nobody likes being alone that much. I don't go out of my way to make friends, that's all. It just leads to disappointment.”
“Despite your best efforts, people are going to be hurt when it's time for them to be hurt.”
“No truth can cure the sorrow we feel from losing a loved one. No truth, no sincerity, no strength, no kindness can cure that sorrow. All we can do is see it through to the end and learn some...”
“I was always hungry for love. Just once, I wanted to know what it was like to get my fill of it -- to be fed so much love I couldn't take any more. Just once.”
“Life is here, death is over there. I am here, not over there.”
“But who can say what's best? That's why you need to grab whatever chance you have of happiness where you find it, and not worry about other people too much. My experience tells me that we ge...”
“Don't feel sorry for yourself. Only assholes do that.”
“The years nineteen and twenty are a crucial stage in the maturation of character, and if you allow yourself to become warped when you're that age, it will cause you pain when you're older.”
“I have a million things to talk to you about. All I want in this world is you. I want to see you and talk. I want the two of us to begin everything from the beginning.”
“I don't go out of my way to make friends, that's all.”
“Memory is a funny thing. When I was in the scene, I hardly paid it any mind. I never stopped to think of it as something that would make a lasting impression, certainly never imagined that e...”
“A gentleman is someone who does not what he wants to do, but what he should do.”
“Life doesn't require ideals. It requires standards of action.”
“Everything was too sharp and clear, so that I could never tell where to start- the way a map that shows too much can sometimes be useless.”
“With my eyes closed, I would touch a familiar book and draw its fragrance deep inside me. This was enough to make me happy.”
“In his or her own way, everyone I saw before me looked happy. Whether they were really happy or just looked it, I couldn't tell. But they did look happy on this pleasant early afternoon in l...”
“It's easy to talk big, but the important thing is whether or not you clean up the shit.”
“That's the kind of death that frightens me. The shadow of death slowly, slowly eats away at the region of life, and before you know it everything's dark and you can't see, and the people aro...”
“The others in the dorm thought I wanted to be a writer, because I was always alone with a book, but I had no such ambition. There was nothing I wanted to be.”
“Somewhere between 'not enough' and 'not at all.' I was always hungry for love. Just once, I wanted to know what it was like to get my fill of it - to be fed so much love I couldn't take any...”
“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.”
“People leave strange little memories of themselves behind when they die.”
“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 part...”