Haruki Murakami Quotes

539 Sourced Quotes

What the world needs is a set villain that people can point at and say, It's all your fault!

Haruki Murakami
The sense of tragedy - according to Aristotle - comes, ironically enough, not from the protagonist's weak points but from his good qualities. Do you know what I'm getting at? People are drawn deeper into tragedy not by their defects but by their virtues.... [But] we accept irony through a device called metaphor. And through that we grow and become deeper human beings.

Haruki Murakami
Such wounds to the heart will probably never heal. But we cannot simply sit and stare at our wounds forever.

Haruki Murakami
And once the storm is over, you won't remember how you made it through, how you managed to survive. You won't even be sure, whether the storm is really over. But one thing is certain. When you come out of the storm, you won't be the same person who walked in. That's what this storm's all about.

Haruki Murakami
Ordinary imperfect people, always choose similarly imperfect people as friends.

Haruki Murakami
Like it or not, it's the society we live in. Even the standard of right and wrong has been subdivided, made sophisticated. Within good, there's fashionable good and unfashionable good, and ditto for bad. Within fashionable good, there's formal and then there's casual; there's hip, there's cool, there's trendy, there's snobbish. Mix 'n' match.

Haruki Murakami
I may not be the most likable person in the world, but I try not to upset people.

Haruki Murakami
Life is here, death is over there. I am here, not over there.

Haruki Murakami
If there's any guy crazy enough to attack me, I'm going to show him the end of the world — close up. I'm going to let him see the kingdom come with his own eyes. I'm going to send him straight to the southern hemisphere and let the ashes of death rain all over him and the kangaroos and the wallabies.

Haruki Murakami
The Earth, time, concepts, love, life, faith justice, evil - they're all fluid and in transition. They don't stay in one form or in one place forever. The whole universe is like some big FedEx box.

Haruki Murakami
I am here, alone, at the end of the world. I reach out and touch nothing..

Haruki Murakami
I'm a very ordinary human being; I just happen to like reading books.

Haruki Murakami
Waiting for your answer is one of the most painful things I have ever been through. At least let me know whether or not I hurt you.

Haruki Murakami
Things can be seen better in the darkness," he said, as if he had just seen into her mind. "But the longer you spend in the dark, the harder it becomes to return to the world aboveground where the light is

Haruki Murakami
We knew exactly what we wanted in each other. And even so, it ended. One day it stopped, as if the film simply slipped off the reel.

Haruki Murakami
Where I went in my travels, it's impossible for me to recall. I remember the sights and sounds and smells clearly enough, but the names of the towns are gone, as well as any sense of the order in which I traveled from place to place.

Haruki Murakami
Maybe it's just hiding somewhere. Or gone on a trip to come home. But falling in love is always a pretty crazy thing. It might appear out of the blue and just grab you. Who knows — maybe even tomorrow.

Haruki Murakami
It's just like Yeats said. In dreams begin responsibilities. Flip this around and you could say that where there's no power to imagine, no responsibility can arise.

Haruki Murakami
Generally, people who are good at writing letters have no need to write letters. They've got plenty of life to lead inside their own context.

Haruki Murakami
I'm the kind of person who has to totally commit to whatever I do.

Haruki Murakami
All right, then, I thought: here I am in the bottom of a well.

Haruki Murakami
I can't build a simple shelf. I have no idea how to change an oil filter on a car. I can't even stick a stamp on an envelope straight. And I'm always dialling the wrong number. But I have come up with a few original cocktails that people seem to like.

Haruki Murakami
They put up with such strenuous training, and where did their thoughts, their hopes and dreams, disappear to? When people pass away, do their thoughts just vanish?

Haruki Murakami
I can be hurt, you know. I can get as exhausted as anybody else. I can feel so bad I want to cry, too.

Haruki Murakami
I don't really know if it's the right thing to do, making new life. Kids grow up, generations take their place. What does it all come to? More hills bulldozed and more ocean fronts filled in? Faster cars and more cats run over? Who needs it?

Haruki Murakami
In this world, there are things you can only do alone, and things you can only do with somebody else. It's important to combine the two in just the right amount.

Haruki Murakami
Overhead, the two moons worked together to bathe the world in a strange light.

Haruki Murakami
Suicides? Heart attacks? The papers didn't seem interested. The world was full of ways to die, too many to cover. Newsworthy deaths had to be exceptional. Most people go unobserved.

Haruki Murakami
She was beautiful and seemingly quite intelligent, what with her pentameter search system. There wasn't a reason in the world not to find her appealing.

Haruki Murakami
Memories warm you up from the inside. But they also tear you apart.

Haruki Murakami