Haruki Murakami Quotes

539 Sourced Quotes

Everybody has to start somewhere. You have your whole future ahead of you. Perfection doesn't happen right away.

Haruki Murakami
Someone once said that nothing costs more and yields less benefit than revenge, Aomame said. Winston Churchill. As I recall it, though, he was making excuses for the British Empire's budget deficits. It has no moral significance.

Haruki Murakami
You can keep as quiet as you like, but one of these days somebody is going to find you.

Haruki Murakami
The ocean was one of the greatest things he had ever seen in his life—bigger and deeper than anything he had imagined. It changed its color and shape and expression according to time and place and weather. It aroused a deep sadness in his heart, and at the same time it brought his heart peace and comfort.

Haruki Murakami
You're afraid of imagination and even more afraid of dreams. Afraid of the resposibility that begins in dreams. But you have to sleep and dreams are a part of sleep. When you're awake you can suppress imagination but you can't supress dreams.

Haruki Murakami
I'm a coward when it comes to matters of the heart. That is my fatal flaw.

Haruki Murakami
Money had no name of course. And if it did have a name, it would no longer be money. What gave money its true meaning was its dark-night namelessness, its breathtaking interchangeability.

Haruki Murakami
The morning air of the pasture turned steadily cooler. Day by day, the bright golden leaves of the birches turned more spotted as the first winds of winter slipped between the withered branches and across the highlands toward the southeast. Stopping in the center of the pasture, I could hear the winds clearly. No turning back, they pronounced. The brief autumn was gone.

Haruki Murakami
And when you come back to Japan next summer, let's have that date or whatever you want to call it. We can go to the zoo or the botanical garden or the aquarium, and then we'll have the most politically correct and scrumptious omelets we can find.

Haruki Murakami
If you can love someone with your whole heart, even one person, then there's salvation in life. Even if you can't get together with that person.

Haruki Murakami
My peak? Would I even have one? I hardly had had anything you could call a life. A few ripples. some rises and falls. But that's it. Almost nothing. Nothing born of nothing. I'd loved and been loved, but I had nothing to show. It was a singularly plain, featureless landscape. I felt like I was in a video game. A surrogate Pacman, crunching blindly through a labyrinth of dotted lines. The only certainty was my death.

Haruki Murakami
I'll never see them again. I know that. And they know that. And knowing this, we say farewell.

Haruki Murakami
Something in her small eyes caught the sunlight and glistened, like a glacier on the faraway face of a mountain.

Haruki Murakami
Despite your best efforts, people are going to be hurt when it's time for them to be hurt.

Haruki Murakami
He was silent for thirty seconds, maybe a minute. I uncrossed my legs under the table and wondered if this was the right moment to leave. It was as if my whole life revolved around trying to judge the right point in a conversation to say goodbye.

Haruki Murakami
I have these realistic dreams and snap wide awake in the middle of the night. And for a while I can't work out what's real and what isn't... That kind of feeling. Do you have any idea what I'm saying?

Haruki Murakami
She was a keen observer, a precise user of language, sharp-tongued and funny. She could stir your emotions. Yes, really, that's what she was so good at - stirring people's emotions, moving you. And she knew she had this power...I only realized later. At the time, I had no idea what she was doing to me.

Haruki Murakami
Love can rebuild the world, they say, so everything's possible when it comes to love.

Haruki Murakami
Those were strange days, now that I look back at them. In the midst of life, everything revolved around death.

Haruki Murakami
It's true though: time moves in its own special way in the middle of the night," the bartender says, loudly striking a book match and lighting a cigarette. "You can't fight it.

Haruki Murakami
But knowing what I don't want to do doesn't help me figure out what I do want to do. I could do just about anything if somebody made me. But I don't have an image of the one thing I really want to do. That's my problem now. I can't find the image.

Haruki Murakami
At any rate, that's how I started running. Thirty three—that's how old I was then. Still young enough, though no longer a young man. The age that Jesus Christ died. The age that Scott Fitzgerald started to go downhill. That age may be a kind of crossroads in life. That was the age when I began my life as a runner, and it was my belated, but real, starting point as a novelist.

Haruki Murakami
As time goes on, you'll understand. What lasts, lasts; what doesn't, doesn't. Time solves most things. And what time can't solve, you have to solve yourself.

Haruki Murakami
It's just that you're about to do something out of the ordinary. And after you do something like that, the everyday look of things might seem to change a little. Things may look different to you than they did before. But don't let appearances fool you. There's always only one reality.

Haruki Murakami
You can't look too far ahead. Do that and you'll lose sight of what you're doing and stumble. I'm not saying you should focus solely on the details right in front of you, mind you. You've got to look ahead a bit or else you'll bump into something. You've got to conform to the proper order and at the same time keep an eye out for what's ahead. That's critical, no matter what you're doing.

Haruki Murakami
Of course life frightens me sometimes. I don't happen to take that as the premise for everything else though. I'm going to give it hundred percent and go as far as I can. I'll take what I want and leave what I don't want. That's how I intend to live my life, and it things go bad, I'll stop and reconsider at that point. If you think about it, an unfair society is a society that makes it possible for you to exploit your abilities to the limit.

Haruki Murakami
When I open them, most of the books have the smell of an earlier time leaking out between the pages - a special odor of the knowledge and emotions that for ages have been calmly resting between the covers. Breathing it in, I glance through a few pages before returning each book to its shelf.

Haruki Murakami
Have you ever had that feeling—that you'd like to go to a whole different place and become a whole different self?

Haruki Murakami
No matter how far you travel, you can never get away from yourself.

Haruki Murakami
That's all I think about these days. Must be because I have so much time to kill every day. When you don't have anything to do, your thoughts get really, really far out-so far out you can't follow them all the way to the end.

Haruki Murakami