Haruki Murakami
Haruki Murakami
Haruki Murakamiis a contemporary Japanese writer. His books and stories have been bestsellers in Japan as well as internationally, with his work being translated into 50 languages and selling millions of copies outside his native country. The critical acclaim for his fiction and non-fiction has led to numerous awards, in Japan and internationally, including the World Fantasy Awardand the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award. His oeuvre received, for example, the Franz Kafka Prizeand the Jerusalem Prize...
NationalityJapanese
ProfessionWriter
Date of Birth12 January 1949
CountryJapan
What we needed were not words and promises but a steady accumulation of small realities.
That's gotta be one of the principles behind reality. Accepting things that are hard to comprehend, and leaving them that way.
And her sleep was too long and deep for that:so deep that she left her normal reality behind.
There are symbolic dreams-- dreams that symbolize some reality. Then there are symbolic realities -- realities that symbolize a dream. Symbols are what you might call the honorary town councillors of the worm universe. In the worm universe, there is nothing unusual about a dairy cow seeking a pair of pliers. A cow is bound to get her pliers sometime. It has nothing to do with me.
The best way to think about reality, I had decided, was to get as far away from it as possible.
The honour of physical decline is waiting, and you have to get used to that reality.
Reality's just the accumulation of ominous prophecies come to life. All you have to do is open a newspaper on any given day to weigh the good news versus the bad news, and you'll see what I mean.
I'm not afraid to die. What I'm afraid of is having reality get the better of me, of having reality leave me behind.
In dreams you don't need to make any distinctions between things. Not at all. Boundaries don't exist. So in dreams there are hardly ever collisions. Even if there are, they don't hurt. Reality is different. Reality bites. Reality, reality.
I realize now that the reality of things is not something you convey to people but something you make.
In order to pin down reality as realilty, we need another reality to relativize the first. Yet that other reality requires a third reality to serve as its grounding. An endless chain is created within our consciousness, and it is the maintenance of this chain which produces the sensation that we are actually here, that we ourselves exist.
Don't let appearances fool you. There's always only one reality!
Things may look different to you than they did before. I've had that experience myself. But don't let appearances fool you. There's only one reality.
It's just that you're about to do something out of the ordinary. And after you do something like that, the everyday look of things might seem to change a little. Things may look different to you than they did before. But don't let appearances fool you. There's always only one reality.