Haruki Murakami Quotes

539 Sourced Quotes

Sex is an extremely subtle undertaking, unlike going to the department store on a Sunday to buy a thermos.

Haruki Murakami
I always feel like I'm struggling to become someone else. Like I'm trying to find a new place, grab hold of a new life, a new personality. I guess it's part of growing up; it's also an attempt to reinvent myself.

Haruki Murakami
Listen to this, Nimit. Follow Coleman Hawkins' improvised lines very carefully. He is using them to tell us something. Pay very close attention. He is telling us the story of the free spirit that is doing everything it can to escape from within him. That same kind of spirit is inside me, inside you. There-you can hear it, I'm sure: the hot breath, the shivering heart. (Thailand)

Haruki Murakami
If she did experience sex-or something close to it-in high school, I'm sure it would have been less out of sexual desire or love than literary curiosity.

Haruki Murakami
Everything has boundaries. the same holds true with thought. you shouldn't fear boundaries, but you also should not be afraid of destroying them. that's what is most important if you want to be free: respect for and exasperation with boundaries. what's really important in life is always the things that are secondary.

Haruki Murakami
In long-distance running the only opponent you have to beat is yourself, the way you used to be.

Haruki Murakami
You can hide as cleverly as you like, but in the final analysis mimicry is deception, pure and simple. It doesn't solve a thing.

Haruki Murakami
Life might just be an absurd, even crude, chain of events and nothing more.

Haruki Murakami
The best way to think about reality, I had decided, was to get as far away from it as possible.

Haruki Murakami
You know, the usual story. Once upon a time I was playing my harp by a spring when a fairy appeared out of nowhere, handed me a Beretta Model 92, and told me to shoot the white rabbit over there for target practice.

Haruki Murakami
Everyone, deep in their hearts, is waiting for the end of the world to come.

Haruki Murakami
To me, love is a pure idea forged in flesh, awkwardly maybe, but it had to connect to somewhere, despite twists and turns of underground cable. An all-too-perfect thing. Sometimes the lines get crossed. Or you get a wrong number. But that's nobody's fault. It'll always be like that, so long as we exist in this physical form. As a matter of principle.

Haruki Murakami
It was a narrow world, a world that was standing still. But the narrower it became, the more it betook of stillness, the more this world that enveloped me seemed to overflow with things and people that could only be called strange. They had been there all the while, it seemed, waiting in the shadows for me to stop moving. And every time the wind-up bird came to my yard to wind its spring, the world descendedmore deeply into chaos.

Haruki Murakami
Of course you got rights, the law's on your side, but sometimes the law takes a long time to kick in and so it gets put in the hands of us poor suckers on duty. You get my drift?

Haruki Murakami
Good style happens in one of two ways: the writer either has an inborn talent or is willing to work herself to death to get it.

Haruki Murakami
The grounds of the place were dominated by several large, old willow trees that towered over the surrounding stone wall and swayed soundlessly in the wind like lost souls.

Haruki Murakami
My point is: in this whole wide world the only person you can depend on is you.

Haruki Murakami
When you're young, you think you can handle anything. By the time you find out otherwise, it's already too late. You got a stocking wrapped around your neck.

Haruki Murakami
Not that running away's going to solve everything. I don't want to rain on your parade or anything, but I wouldn't count on escaping this place if I were you. No matter how far you run. Distance might not solve anything.

Haruki Murakami
I bet the reason people are afraid of going bald is because it makes them think of the end of life. I mean, when your hair starts to thin, it must feel as if your life is being worn away... as if you've taken a giant step in the direction of death, the last Big Consumption.

Haruki Murakami
I probably still haven't completely adapted to the world. I don't know, I feel like this isn't the real world. The people, the scene: they just don't seem real to me.

Haruki Murakami
I was feeling lonely without her, but the fact that I could feel lonely at all was consolation. Loneliness wasn't such a bad feeling. It was like the stillness of the pin oak after the little birds had flown off.

Haruki Murakami
There wasn't a cloud in the sky, no wind, and everything was quiet around us - all we could hear were birds chirping in the woods. The war seemed like something in a faraway land that had nothing to do with us. We sang songs as we hiked up the hill, sometimes imitating the birds we heard. Except for the fact that the war was still going on, it was a perfect morning.

Haruki Murakami
We can, if we so choose, wander aimlessly over the continent of the arbitrary. Rootless as some winged seed blown about on a serendipitous spring breeze.

Haruki Murakami
And as we live our lives we discover - drawing toward us the thin threads attached to each - what has been lost. I closed my eyes and tried to bring to mind as many beautiful lost things as I could. Drawing them closer, holding on to them.

Haruki Murakami
Perhaps I'm just too painstaking a type of person, but I can't grasp much of anything without putting down my thoughts in writing.

Haruki Murakami
Don't let thoughts of me hold you back. Just do what you want to do. Otherwise, I might end up taking you with me, and that is the one thing I don't want to do. I don't want to interfere with your life.

Haruki Murakami
Why do I act like this, agreeing when I really disagree, letting people force me to do things I don't want to do?

Haruki Murakami
If, as the dowager had said, we are nothing but gene carriers, why do so many of us have to lead such strangely shaped lives? Wouldn't our genetic purpose-to transmit DNA-be served just as well if we lived simple lives, not bothering our heads with a lot of extraneous thoughts, devoted entirely to preserving life and procreating? Did it benefit the genes in any way for us to lead such intricately warped, even bizarre, lives?

Haruki Murakami