Haruki Murakami Quotes

539 Sourced Quotes

Friends don't need the intervention of a third party. Friendship's a voluntary thing.

Haruki Murakami
In most cases learning something essential in life requires physical pain.

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
Either I'm funny or the world's funny. I don't know which. The bottle and lid don't fit. It could be the bottle's fault or the lid's fault. In either case, there's no denying that the fit is bad.

Haruki Murakami
It doesn't matter how old I get, but as long as I continue to live I'll always discover something new about myself.

Haruki Murakami
I find myself thinking about my ongoing existence as a human being and the path that lies ahead of me. Though of course these thoughts lead to but one place - death.

Haruki Murakami
Wasn't he the one who said you shouldn't trust anybody who calls himself an ordinar man? - Naoko

Haruki Murakami
How wonderful it is to be able to write someone a letter! To feel like conveying your thoughts to a person, to sit at your desk and pick up a pen, to put your thoughts into words like this is truly marvelous.

Haruki Murakami
A regular wind-up toy world this is, I think. Once a day the wind-up bird has to come and wind the springs of this world. Alone in this fun house, only I grow old, a pale softball of death swelling inside me. Yet even as I sleep somewhere between Saturn and Uranus, wind-up birds everywhere are busy at work fulfilling their appointed rounds.

Haruki Murakami
Even if you managed to escape from one cage, weren't you just in another, larger one?

Haruki Murakami
I wasn't particularly afraid of death itself. As Shakespeare said, die this year and you don't have to die the next.

Haruki Murakami
Grandfather always said school's a place where they take sixteen years to wear down your brain. Grandfather hardly went to school either.

Haruki Murakami
This is no honky-tonk parade. 1Q84 is the real world, where a cut draws real blood, where pain is real pain and fear is real fear. The moon in the sky is no paper moon.

Haruki Murakami
If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking.

Haruki Murakami
What I was chasing in circles must have been the tail of the darkness inside me.

Haruki Murakami
A story is not something of this world. A real story requires a kind of magical baptism to link the world on this side with the world on the other side.

Haruki Murakami
It depends on which reality you take and which reality I take.

Haruki Murakami
Most everything you think you know about me is nothing more than memories.

Haruki Murakami
What happens when people open their hearts?"... "They get better.

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

Haruki Murakami
Gazing at the rain, I consider what it means to belong, to become part of something. To have someone cry for me.

Haruki Murakami
The thing I'm most afraid of is me. Of not knowing what I'm going to do. Of not knowing what I'm doing right now

Haruki Murakami
I want to believe you, but if that's true, I just don't get it. Why does loving somebody mean you have to hurt them just as much? I mean, if that's the way it goes, what's the point of loving someone?

Haruki Murakami
Most people are not looking for provable truths. As you said, truth is often accompanied by intense pain, and almost no one is looking for painful truths. What people need is beautiful, comforting stories that make them feel as if their lives have some meaning. Which is where religion comes from.

Haruki Murakami
Let the world move along as it pleased. If it had any business with him, it would be sure to tell him.

Haruki Murakami
Letters are just pieces of paper," I said. "Burn them, and what stays in your heart will stay; keep them, and what vanishes will vanish.

Haruki Murakami
Of course you keep telling yourself there's something to be learned from everything, and growing old shouldn't be that hard. That's the general drift.

Haruki Murakami
So this was how secrets got started, I thought to myself. People constructed them little by little. I had not intended to keep May Kasahara a secret from Kumiko. My relationship with her was not that big a deal, finally: whether I mentioned it or not was of no consequence. Once it had flown down a certain delicate channel, however, it had become cloaked in the opacity of secretiveness, whatever my original "intention" had have been.

Haruki Murakami
If there's something I can't do but want to, I won't relax until I'm able to do it.

Haruki Murakami
But intolerant, narrow minds with no imagination are like parasites that transform the host, change form, and continue to thrive. They're a lost cause, and I don't want anyone like that coming in here.

Haruki Murakami