Tao Te Ching

The Power of Goodness, the Wisdom Beyond Words
Search Quotes Search Sages Search Chapters

Killing Commendatore

By Haruki Murakami
Trans: Philip Gabriel, Ted Godssen

In characteristic Murakami style, this latest communication from him takes us through “a land built upon the conjunction of phenomena and expression”—Concepts and Ideas—on a perilous “Path of Metaphor” where dangerous Double Metaphors lurk in the darkness and we are guided by a personification of the link between phenomena and language and travel like “a helpless jellyfish adrift on the ocean.” In some ways, this is a meditation on art that humanizes artistic principles giving them life in the “real” world as the best metaphors launch new realities into the world. It explores the process of creativity, how something new arises out of emptiness, and how this principle applies not only to external manifestations of art; but also, how it portrays inner transformations in unconscious realms of consciousness like “earthquakes deep under the sea.” We cross rivers that divide the real from the unreal, journey through a “sea of trees” navigating the “interstice between presence and absence” where each action will generate a response “in accordant with the principle of connectivity.”

Themes

Quotes from Killing Commendatore

“Can anything be completely correct, or completely incorrect? We live in a world where rain might fall 30% or 70% of the time. Truth is probably no different. There could be 30% or 70% truth.”

Chapters:

Themes: Truth

Comments: Click to comment

“Everything has a bright side. The top of even the blackest, thickest cloud shines like silver.”

Chapters:

Comments: Click to comment

“From a distance, most things look beautiful.”

Chapters:

Themes: Beauty

Comments: 1 comment

“Gazing intently at a pure white canvas… Nothing is painted there yet, but it’s more than a simple blank space… various possibilities congeal into a perfect clue.. The moment when existence and nonexistence coalesce.”

Chapters:

Comments: Click to comment

“Gazing intently at a pure white canvas… Nothing is painted there yet, but it’s more than a simple blank space… various possibilities congeal into a perfect clue.. The moment when existence and nonexistence coalesce.”

Chapters:

Themes: Emptiness

Comments: Click to comment

“I have no need to challenge my life in such a troublesome or unnatural way because I am endowed with the capacity to ‘believe.’ I believe in all honesty that something will appear to guide me through the darkest and narrowest tunnel, or across the most desolate plain.”

Chapters:

Themes: Belief

Comments: Click to comment

“I was past the point of determining what was just and unjust. In a world outside space and time, all dualities—before and after, up and down—ceased to exist. In such a world, I could no longer perceive myself as myself. I and myself were being torn apart.”

Chapters:

Themes: Moral Freedom

Comments: Click to comment

“If you want to know yourself better, you have to bring in something different from someplace else… that’s why we need pictures or literature, or music”

Chapters:

Comments: Click to comment

“Instead of a stable truth, I choose unstable possibilities. I choose to surrender myself to that instability.”

Chapters:

Themes: Creativity

Comments: Click to comment

“Just as a great poet can use one scene to bring another new, unknown vista into view… the best metaphors make the best poems… filled with hidden possibilities that only the finest metaphors can bring to the surface.”

Chapters:

Themes: Poetry

Comments: Click to comment

“Like trees grown together: our roots joined in the dark, our sap intermingled. In this condition, self and other blended like the paints on my palette, their borers ever more indistinct.”

Chapters:

Comments: Click to comment

“Maybe the chain of events will not flow so smoothly in reality… Just maybe, there are too many maybes. But there is no alternative. There is not the luxury of choice.”

Chapters:

Themes: Free Will

Comments: Click to comment

“Memory can give warmth to time. And art can—when it goes well—give shape to that memory, even fix it in history. Much as van Gogh inscribed the figure of a country mailman on our collective memory so well that he lives on, even today.”

Chapters:

Themes: Memory

Comments: Click to comment

“No one can tell what is or is not the real thing. All that we see is a product of connectivity. Light here is a metaphor for shadow, shadow a metaphor for light.”

Chapters:

Comments: Click to comment

“Once you’re considered a legend, you can only trace the pattern of your rise for the rest of your life… it could be a real nightmare… I can’t think of anything more boring that that.”

Chapters:

Themes: Fame Anonymity

Comments: Click to comment

“Paintings are strange things: as they near the end they acquire their own will, their own viewpoint, even their own powers of speech.”

Chapters:

Themes: Art

Comments: Click to comment

“People can accomplish anything if they want it badly enough… reality can become unreal. Or unreality can enter the realm of the real. If we desire it that strongly. Deep in our heart. But that doesn’t mean that we are free. It might demonstrate quite the opposite.”

Chapters:

Themes: Inspiration

Comments: Click to comment

“People can forget what they should remember, and remember what by all rights and purposes they should forget. Especially when death approaches.”

Chapters:

Themes: Forget

Comments: Click to comment

“People devote a lot of energy to thinking about things. Whether they want to or not. Yet in the end we all just have to wait—only time can tell how events play out. The answers lie ahead.”

Chapters:

Comments: Click to comment

“The best ideas are thoughts that appear, unbidden, from out of the dark.”

Chapters:

Themes: Non-Thought

Comments: Click to comment

“The truth is a symbol, and symbols are the truth. It is best to grasp symbols the way they are. When people try to use a method other than the truth to follow along the path of understanding, it is like trying to use a sieve to hold water. No one can ever float something full of holes on water… allegories and metaphors are not something you should explain in words. You just grasp them and accept them.”

Chapters:

Comments: Click to comment

“There are plenty of things in history that are best left in the shadows. Accurate knowledge does not improve people’s lives… The objective does not necessarily surpass the subjective, you know. Reality does not necessarily extinguish fantasy…”

Chapters:

Comments: Click to comment

“There’s a point in everyone’s life where they need a major transformation. And when that time comes, you have to grab it by the tail, grab it hard and never let go… They obliterate the stye they’ve worked in, and out of the ruins they rise up again.”

Chapters:

Comments: Click to comment

Related Lineages (0 lineages)

Quotes about Killing Commendatore (0 quotes)

Comments (0)