"The point is, not to resist the flow. You go up when you’re supposed to go up and down when you’re supposed to go down. When you’re supposed to go up, find the highest tower and climb to the top. When you’re supposed to go down, find the deepest well and go down to the bottom. When there is no flow, stay still. If you resist the flow, everything dries up. If everything dries up, the world is darkness."
- Haruki Murakami, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle
"But even so, every now and then I would feel a violent stab of loneliness. The very water I drink, the very air I breathe, would feel like long, sharp needles. The pages of a book in my hands would take on the threatening metallic gleam of razor blades. I could hear the roots of loneliness creeping through me when the world was hushed at four o’clock in the morning."
- Haruki Murakami, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle
"Maybe the world was like a revolving door, it occurred to him as his consciousness was fading away. And which section you ended up in was just a matter of where your foot happened to fall."
- Haruki Murakami, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle
"Memories and thoughts age, just as people do. But certain thoughts can never age, and certain memories can never fade."
- Haruki Murakami, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle
Kimberley Salt
Kimberley Salt’s color-saturated illustration exploring the motifs from Haruki Murakami’s 2005 Kafka on the Shore wins her a paid commission for NOWNESS in the Drawing Inspiration competition tied to today’s release of Murakami’s newest novel 1Q84. All submissions here
(via nevver)
"As time goes on, you’ll understand. What lasts, lasts; what doesn’t, doesn’t. Time solves most things. And what time can’t solve, you have to solve yourself."
- Haruki Murakami, Dance, Dance, Dance
"Metaphors can reduce the distance. (…) Metaphors help eliminate what separates you and me."
- Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore
"
You sit at the edge of the world,
I am in a crater that’s no more.
Words without letters
Standing in the shadow of the door.
The moon shines down on a sleeping lizard,
Little fish rain down from the sky.
Outside the window there are soldiers,
Steeling themselves to die.
Kafka sits in a chair by the shore,
Thinking of the pendulum that moves the world, it seems.
When your heart is closed,
The shadow of the unmoving Sphinx,
Becomes a knife that pierces your dreams.
The drowning girl’s fingers
Search for the entrance stone, and more.
Lifting the hem of her azure dress,
She gazes –
at Kafka on the shore.
"
- Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore
