Haruki Murakami Quotes

539 Sourced Quotes

There's no such thing as perfect writing, just like there's no such thing as perfect despair.

Haruki Murakami
If you remember me, then I don't care if everyone else forgets.

Haruki Murakami
The silence grew deeper, so deep that if you listened carefully you might very well catch the sound of the earth revolving on its axis.

Haruki Murakami
What do we talk about? Just ordinary things. What happened today, or books we've read, or tomorrow's weather, you know. Don't tell me you're wondering if people jump to their feet and shout stuff like 'It'll rain tomorrow if a polar bear eats the stars tonight!

Haruki Murakami
The pure present is an ungraspable advance of the past devouring the future. In truth, all sensation is already memory.

Haruki Murakami
There's an essential order you have to follow in everything. It's a way of showing respect, following everything in the correct order.

Haruki Murakami
Not that we were incompatible: we just had nothing to talk about.

Haruki Murakami
Well, think of what I'm doing to you right now. For me I'm the self, and you're the object. For you, of course, it's the exact opposite—you're the self to you and I'm the object. And by exchanging self and object, we can project ourselves onto the other and gain self-consciousness. Volitionally. I still don't get it, but it sure feels good. That's the whole idea, the girl said.

Haruki Murakami
You don't have to judge the whole world by your own standards. Not everybody is like you, you know.

Haruki Murakami
I would stare at the grains of light suspended in that silent space, struggling to see into my own heart. What did I want? And what did others want from me? But I could never find the answers. Sometimes I would reach out and try to grasp the grains of light, but my fingers touched nothing.

Haruki Murakami
This may be the most important proposition revealed by history: At the time, no one knew what was coming.

Haruki Murakami
Sex is an extremely subtle undertaking, unlike going to the department store on a Sunday to buy a thermos.

Haruki Murakami
Everything has boundaries. the same holds true with thought. you shouldn't fear boundaries, but you also should not be afraid of destroying them. that's what is most important if you want to be free: respect for and exasperation with boundaries. what's really important in life is always the things that are secondary.

Haruki Murakami
My biggest fault is that the faults I was born with grow bigger each year. It's like I was raising chickens inside me. The chickens lay eggs and the eggs hatch into other chickens, which then lay eggs. Is this any way to live a life? What with all these faults I've got going, I have to wonder. Sure, I get by. But in the end, that's not the question, is it?

Haruki Murakami
The sad truth is that certain types of things can't go backward. Once they start going forward, no matter what you do, they can't go back the way they were. If even one little thing goes awry, then that's how it will stay forever.

Haruki Murakami
And as the years have passed, the time has grown longer. The sad truth is that what I could recall in five seconds all too needed ten, then thirty, then a full minute - like shadows lengthening at dusk. Someday, I suppose, the shadows will be swallowed up in darkness.

Haruki Murakami
Sometimes I think I've got this hard kernel in my heart, and nothing much can get inside it. I doubt if I can really love anybody.

Haruki Murakami
I don't know — maybe the world has two different kinds of people, and for one kind the world is this completely logical, rice pudding place, and for the other it's all hit-or-miss macaroni gratin.

Haruki Murakami
You know what it's like when you're trying to fall asleep and it only makes you more wide awake?

Haruki Murakami
Time weighs down on you like an old, ambiguous dream. You keep on moving, trying to sleep through it. But even if you go to the ends of the earth, you won't be able to escape it. Still, you have to go there- to the edge of the world. There's something you can't do unless you get there.

Haruki Murakami
Whether you take the doughnut hole as a blank space or as an entity unto itself is a purely metaphysical question and does not affect the taste of the doughnut one bit.

Haruki Murakami
Everybody's born with some different thing at the core of their existence. And that thing, whatever it is, becomes like a heat source that runs each person from the inside. I have one too, of course. Like everybody else. But sometimes it gets out of hand. It swells or shrinks inside me, and it shakes me up. What I'd really like to do is find a way to communicate that feeling to another person.

Haruki Murakami
According to Aristophanes in Plato's The Banquet, in the ancient world of legend there were three types of people.
In ancient times people weren't simply male or female, but one of three types : male/male, male/female or female/female. In other words, each person was made out of the components of two people. Everyone was happy with this arrangement and never really gave it much thought. But then God took a knife and cut everyone in half, right down the middle. So after that the world was divided just into male and female, the upshot being that people spend their time running around trying to locate their missing half.

Haruki Murakami
I want to write about people who dream and wait for the night to end, who long for the light so they can hold the ones they love.

Haruki Murakami
People sometimes sneer at those who run every day, claiming they'll go to any length to live longer. But don't think that's the reason most people run. Most runners run not because they want to live longer, but because they want to live life to the fullest.

Haruki Murakami