“The power to concentrate was the most important thing. Living without this power would be like opening one’s eyes without seeing anything.”
More from Haruki Murakami on Life
“Every story has a time to be told”
“I'm all alone, but I'm not lonely.”
“I was much younger, much hungrier, much more alone. But I was myself, pared down to the essentials.”
“You can hide memories, suppress them, but you can’t erase the history that produced them”
“When you come out of the storm you won't be the same person that walked in. That's what the storm is all about.”
“Memories warm you up from the inside. But they also tear you apart.”
“There are some things we can never assign to oblivion, memories we can never rub away. They remain with us forever, like a touchstone.”
“Wherever there's hope there's a trial.”
“So the fact that I’m me and no one else is one of my greatest assets. Emotional hurt is the price a person has to pay in order to be independent.”
“That's what we all do : endlessly take the long way around.”
Others on Life
Jonathan Safran Foer
22 quotes“One hundred years of joy can be erased in one second”
Mitch Albom
18 quotes“Behind all your stories is always your mother's story. Because hers is where yours begin.”
Rainer Maria Rilke
16 quotes“I live my life in widening circles that reach out across the world.”
Henry Miller
15 quotes“We create our fate every day ... most of the ills we suffer from are directly traceable to our own behavior.”
Joseph Campbell
14 quotes“I don't believe people are looking for the meaning of life as much as they are looking for the experience of being alive...”
Lord Byron
14 quotes“The great art of life is sensation to feel that we exist even in pain.”
Cormac McCarthy
14 quotes“People were always getting ready for tomorrow. I didn't believe in that. Tomorrow wasn't getting ready for them. It didn...”
Virginia Woolf
14 quotes“No need to hurry. No need to sparkle. No need to be anybody but oneself.”
Søren Kierkegaard
13 quotes“Life can only be understood backwards but it must be lived forwards.”
Paulo Coelho
13 quotes“And when I think about it, I guess it is true that people always arrive at the right moment at the place where someone a...”
Margaret Atwood
13 quotes“Surviving Is the only warWe can afford”
Sarah Dessen
13 quotes“All those clean, fresh starts had made me forget what it was like, until now, to be messy and honest and out of control....”