Authors
Topics
Lists
Pictures
Resources
More about Haruki Murakami
Haruki Murakami Quotes
539 Sourced Quotes
Source
Report...
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
Source
Report...
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
Source
Report...
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
Source
Report...
Something inside me had dropped away, and nothing came in to fill the cavern.
Haruki Murakami
Source
Report...
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
Source
Report...
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
Source
Report...
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
Source
Report...
Life's no piece of cake, mind you, but the recipe's my own to fool with.
Haruki Murakami
Source
Report...
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
Source
Report...
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
Source
Report...
I'm not a fast reader. I like to linger over each sentence, enjoying the style. If I don't enjoy the writing, I stop.
Haruki Murakami
Source
Report...
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
Source
Report...
Narrow minds devoid of imagination. Intolerance, theories cut off from reality, empty terminology, usurped ideals, inflexible systems. Those are the things that really frighten me. What I absolutely fear and loathe.
Haruki Murakami
Source
Report...
Listening to the music while stretching her body close to its limit, she was able to attain a mysterious calm. She was simultaneously the torturer and the tortured, the forcer and the forced. This sense of inner-directed self-sufficiency was what she wanted most of all. It gave her deep solace.
Haruki Murakami
Source
Report...
Sometimes when I look at you, I feel I'm gazing at a distant star. It's dazzling, but the light is from tens of thousands of years ago. Maybe the star doesn't even exist any more. Yet sometimes that light seems more real to me than anything.
Haruki Murakami
Source
Report...
That's wrong," she declared. "Everyone must have one thing that they can excel at. It's just a matter of drawing it out, isn't it? But school doesn't know how to draw it out. It crushes the gift. It's no wonder most people never get to be what they want to be. They just get ground down.
Haruki Murakami
Source
Report...
Better to be a first-class matchbox than a second-class match.
Haruki Murakami
Source
Report...
Her smile steps offstage for a moment, then does an encore, all while I'm dealing with my blushing face.
Haruki Murakami
Source
Report...
Even castles in the sky can do with a fresh coat of paint.
Haruki Murakami
Source
Report...
It's the same with menus and men and just about anything else: we think we're choosing things for ourselves, but in fact we may not be choosing anything. It could be that everthing's being decided in advance and we pretend we're making choices. Free will may be an illusion. I often think that.
Haruki Murakami
Source
Report...
Not that we were incompatible: we just had nothing to talk about.
Haruki Murakami
Source
Report...
Time really is one big continuous cloth, no? We habitually cut out pieces of time to fit us, so we tend to fool ourselves into thinking that time is our size, but it really goes on and on.
Haruki Murakami
Source
Report...
Time is too conceptual. Not that it stops us from filling it in. So much so, we can't even tell whether our experiences belong to time or to the world of physical things.
Haruki Murakami
Source
Report...
Don't you think it would be wonderful to get rid of everything and everybody and just go some place where you don't know a soul?
Haruki Murakami
Source
Report...
Was it Aristotle who said the human soul is composed of reason, will, and desire? No, that was Plato. Aristotle and Plato were as different as Mel Tormé and Bing Crosby. In any case, things were a lot simpler in the old days, Komatsu said. Wouldn't it be fun to imagine reason, will, and desire engaged in a fierce debate around a table?
Haruki Murakami
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
...
22
Quote of the day
We owe something to extravagance, for thrift and adventure seldom go hand in hand.
Lady Randolph Churchill
Haruki Murakami
Creative Commons
Born:
January 12, 1949
(age 75)
Bio:
Haruki Murakami is a contemporary Japanese writer. His books and stories have been bestsellers in Japan as well as internationally, with his work being translated into 50 languages and selling millions of copies outside his native country.
Known for:
Norwegian Wood (1987)
The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (1994)
Kafka on the Shore (2002)
Most used words:
time
people
life
love
person
mind
place
heart
matter
feel
kind
keep
day
memories
find
Haruki Murakami on Wikipedia
Suggest an edit or a new quote
Haruki Murakami Quotes
Haruki Murakami Short Quotes
Japanese Novelist Quotes
Novelist Quotes
20th-century Novelist Quotes
Related People
Bob Dylan
American Songwriter
Franz Kafka
Czech Author
Philip Roth
American Novelist
Ryū Murakami
Japanese Screenwriter
Banana Yoshimoto
Japanese Author
Featured Authors
Lists
Predictions that didn't happen
If it's on the Internet it must be true
Remarkable Last Words (or Near-Last Words)
Picture Quotes
Confucius
Philip James Bailey
Eleanor Roosevelt
Letitia Elizabeth Landon
Popular Topics
life
love
nature
time
god
power
human
mind
work
art
heart
thought
men
day
×
Lib Quotes