Quote by Haruki Murakami: “Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional.”

Hard things will happen — that cannot be avoided. But how long and how deeply you suffer over them is, to a significant degree, a choice you make in how you respond. This is not a claim that suffering is easy to control, but that your relationship to pain is something you have some say in.

Murakami published What I Talk About When I Talk About Running in 2007, a memoir exploring the parallels between long-distance running and novel writing. Japan in the mid-2000s was recovering from the economic stagnation of the 1990s Lost Decade, and Murakami's themes of quiet individual endurance resonated in a culture reckoning with collective exhaustion.

Japanese novelist whose works, including Norwegian Wood, Kafka on the Shore, and The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, blend realism with the surreal and have made him one of the most internationally recognized living novelists. His memoir What I Talk About When I Talk About Running describes his philosophy of endurance through long-distance running.