Haruki Murakami Quotes

539 Sourced Quotes

That's the kind of death that frightens me. The shadow of death slowly, slowly eats away at the region of life, and before you know it everything's dark and you can't see, and the people around you think of you as more dead than alive.

Haruki Murakami
Genius or fool, you don't live in the world alone. You can hide underground or you can build a wall around yourself, but somebody's going to come along and screw up the works.

Haruki Murakami
I've built a wall around me, never letting anybody inside and trying not to venture outside myself

Haruki Murakami
A certain kind of shittiness, a certain kind of stagnation, a certain kind of darkness, goes on propagating itself by its own power in its own self-contained cycle. And once it passes a certain point, no one can stop it-even if the person himself wants to stop it.

Haruki Murakami
I'd be smiling and chatting away, and my mind would be floating around somewhere else, like a balloon with a broken string.

Haruki Murakami
A certain something, he felt, had managed to work its way in through a tiny opening and was trying to fill a blank space inside him. The void was not one that she had made. It had always been there inside him. She had merely managed to shine a special light on it.

Haruki Murakami
I don't know, there's something about you. Say there's an hourglass: the sand's about to run out. Someone like you can always be counted on to turn the thing over.

Haruki Murakami
In certain areas of my life, I actively seek out solitude. Especially for someone in my line of work, solitude is, more or less, an inevitable circumstance. Sometimes, however, this sense of isolation, like acid spilling out of a bottle, can unconsciously eat away at a person's heart and dissolve it. You could see it, too, as a kind of double-edged sword. It protects me, but at the same time steadily cuts away at me from the inside.

Haruki Murakami
She was, if anything, on the plain side, at least not the type to attract men wherever she went. But there was something in her face that was meant for me alone. Everytime we met, I took a good look at her. And loved what I saw.

Haruki Murakami
Why do people have to be this lonely? What's the point of it all? Millions of people in this world, all of them yearning, looking to others to satisfy them, yet isolating themselves. Why? Was the earth put here just to nourish human loneliness?

Haruki Murakami
I was reduced to pure concept. My flesh had dissolved; my form had dissipated. I floated in space. Liberated of my corporeal being, but without dispensation to go anywhere else.I was adrift in the void. Somewhere across the fine line separating nightmare from reality.

Haruki Murakami
What we call the present is given shape by an accumulation of the past.

Haruki Murakami
With the advent of winter, her eyes seemed to take on a greater transparency, a transparency that lead nowhere. Occassionally, for no particular reason, Naoko would gaze into my eyes as if searching for something. Each time I was filled with odd sensations of lonliness and inadequecy.

Haruki Murakami
Everybody thinks I'm this delicate little girl. But you can't tell a book by it's cover.' To which she added a momentary smile.

Haruki Murakami
And it was the kind of thing that loses the most important nuances when reduced to words. He had never told anyone about it, and he probably never would.

Haruki Murakami
In other words, let's face it: Life is basically unfair. But even in a situation that's unfair, I think it's possible to seek out a kind of fairness. Of course, that might take time and effort. And maybe it won't seem to be worth all that. It's up to each individual to decide whether or not it is.

Haruki Murakami
Results aside, the ability to have complete faith in another human being is one of the finest qualities a person can possess.

Haruki Murakami
Does G get angry because it follows F in the alphabet? Does page 68 in a book start a revolution because it follows 67?

Haruki Murakami
No matter what they wish for, no matter how far they go, people can never be anything but themselves. That's all.

Haruki Murakami
No, I don't want your money. The world moves less by money than by what you owe people and what they owe you. I don't like to owe anybody anything, so I keep to myself as much on the lending side as I can.

Haruki Murakami
He does not exist here, with me, but flesh that does not exist will never die, and promises unmade are never broken.

Haruki Murakami
The good thing about writing books is that you can dream while you are awake.

Haruki Murakami
I don't like the realistic style, myself. I prefer a more surrealistic style.

Haruki Murakami
My style, my prose, is very easy to read. It contains a sense of humor, it's dramatic, and it's a page-turner. There's a sort of magic balance between those two factors; perhaps that's another reason for my success.

Haruki Murakami
When I start to write, I don't have any plan at all. I just wait for the story to come. I don't choose what kind of story it is or what's going to happen. I just wait.

Haruki Murakami
If you're going to while away the years, it's far better to live them with clear goals and fully alive then in a fog, and I believe # running helps you to do that. Exerting yourself to the fullest within your individual limits: that's the essence of running, and a metaphor for life,

Haruki Murakami
Become like a sheet of blotting paper and soak it all in. Later on you can figure out what to keep and what to unload.

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
The facts and techniques or whatever they teach you in class isn't going to be veryuseful in the real world, that's for sure.

Haruki Murakami
If writing novels is like planting a forest, then writing short stories is more like planting a garden.

Haruki Murakami