Haruki Murakami Quotes

539 Sourced Quotes

My heart would swell without warning, and tremble, and lurch with a stab of pain. I would try clamping my eyes shut and gritting my teeth, and waiting for it to pass. And it would pass — but slowly, taking its own time, and leaving a dull ache behind.

Haruki Murakami
But if you knew you might not be able to see it again tomorrow, everything would suddenly become special and precious, wouldn't it?

Haruki Murakami
Properly speaking, should any individual ever have exact, clear knowledge of his own core consciousness?" "I wouldn't know," I said. "Nor would we," said the scientists.

Haruki Murakami
I hate requests. They make me feel unhappy. It's like when I take a book out of the library. As soon as I start to read it, all I can think about is when I'll finish it.

Haruki Murakami
Something inside me had dropped away, and nothing came in to fill the cavern.

Haruki Murakami
Like a Chinese box, the world of the novel contained smaller worlds, and inside those were yet smaller worlds. Together, these worlds made up a single universe, and the universe waited there in the book to be discovered by the reader.

Haruki Murakami
You live by yourself for a stretch of time and you get to staring at different objects. Sometimes you talk to yourself. You take meals in crowded joints. You develop an intimate relationship with your used Subaru. You slowly but surely become a has-been.

Haruki Murakami
If I stayed here, something inside me would be lost forever—something I couldn't afford to lose. It was like a vague dream, a burning, unfulfilled desire. The kind of dream people have only when they're seventeen.

Haruki Murakami
Life's no piece of cake, mind you, but the recipe's my own to fool with.

Haruki Murakami
You don't get it, do you?" I said. It's not a question of 'what then'. Some people get a kick out of reading railroad timetables and that's all they do all day. Some people make huge model boats out of matchsticks. So what's wrong if there happens to be one guy in the world who enjoys trying to understand you?

Haruki Murakami
You end up exhausted and spent, but later, in retrospect, you realize what it all was for. The parts fall into place, and you can see the whole picture and finally understand the role each individual part plays. The dawn comes, the sky grows light, and the colors and shapes of the roofs of houses, which you could only glimpse vaguely before, come into focus.

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
Whenever she felt like crying, she would instead become angry—at someone else or at herself—which meant that it was rare for her to shed tears.

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

Haruki Murakami
My only passions were books and music. As you might guess, I led a lonely life… Not that I knew what I wanted in life - I didn't. I loved reading novels to distraction, but didn't write well enough to be a novelist; being an editor or a critic was out, too, since my tastes ran to the extremes. Novels should be for pure personal enjoyment, I decided, not part of your work or study. That's why I didn't study literature

Haruki Murakami
Sometimes I feel so- I don't know - lonely. The kind of helpless feeling when everything you're used to has been ripped away. Like there's no more gravity, and I'm left to drift in outer space with no idea where I'm going' Like a little lost Sputnik?' I guess so.

Haruki Murakami
Forgive me for stating the obvious, but the world is made up of all kinds of people.

Haruki Murakami
I'm often asked what I think about as I run. Usually the people who ask this have never run long distances themselves. I always ponder the question. What exactly do I think about when I'm running? I don't have a clue.

Haruki Murakami
"Dance," said the Sheep Man. "You gotta dance. As long as the music plays. You gotta dance. Don't even think why. Start to think, your feet stop. Your feet stop, we get stuck. We get stuck, you're stuck. So don't pay any mind, no matter how dumb. You gotta keep the step. You gotta limber up. You gotta loosen what you bolted down. You gotta use all you got. We know you're tired, tired and scared. Happens to everyone, okay? Just don't let your feet stop."

Haruki Murakami
Now for a good twelve-hour sleep, I told myself. Twelve solid hours. Let birds sing, let people go to work. Somewhere out there, a volcano might blow, Israeli commandos might decimate a Palestinian village. I couldn't stop it. I was going to sleep.

Haruki Murakami
Everybody feels safe belonging not to the excluded minority but to the excluding majority. You think, Oh, I'm glad that's not me. It's basically the same in all periods in all societies. If you belong to the majority, you can avoid thinking about lots of troubling things.

Haruki Murakami
I was dying. Like all the other people who live in this world.

Haruki Murakami
As long as an individual's alive, he will undergo experience in some form or other, and those experiences are stored up instant by instant. To stop experiencin' is to die.

Haruki Murakami
Living like an empty shell is not really living, no matter how many years it may go on. The heart and flesh of an empty shell give birth to nothing more than the life of an empty shell.

Haruki Murakami
But who can say what's best? That's why you need to grab whatever chance you have of happiness where you find it, and not worry about other people too much. My experience tells me that we get no more than two or three such chances in a life time, and if we let them go, we regret it for the rest of our lives.

Haruki Murakami
People lose fifty million skin cells every day. The cells get scraped off and turn into invisible dust, and disappear into the air. Maybe we are nothing but skin cells as far as the world is concerned.

Haruki Murakami
I am a flawed human being - a far more flawed human being than you realize.

Haruki Murakami
Even if there were two of me, I still couldn't do all that has to be done. No matter what, though, I keep up my running. Running every day is a kind of lifeline for me, so I'm not going to lay off or quit just because I'm busy. If I used being busy as an excuse not to run, I'd never run again. I have only a few reasons to keep on running, and a truckload of them to quit. All I can do is keep those few reasons nicely polished.

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