Haruki Murakami Quotes

539 Sourced Quotes

Open your eyes, train your ears, use your head. If a mind you have, then use it while you can.

Haruki Murakami
Whenever I meet people for the first time, I get them to talk for ten minutes. Then I size them up from the exact opposite perspective of all they've told me. Do you think that's crazy? No, I said, shaking my head, I'd guess your method works quite well.

Haruki Murakami
Beyond the window, some kind of small, black thing shot across the sky. A bird, possibly. Or it might have been someone's soul being blown to the far side of the world.

Haruki Murakami
This may be the most important proposition revealed by history: At the time, no one knew what was coming.

Haruki Murakami
It seems to me, though, that you always understand very well what I can't say very well. Trouble is I end up being even worse at saying things well.

Haruki Murakami
One last word of advice, though, Mr. Okada, though you may not want to hear this. There are things in this world it is better not to know about. Of course, those are the very things that people most want to know about. It's strange.

Haruki Murakami
Life is so uncertain: you never know what could happen. One way to deal with that is to keep your pajamas washed.

Haruki Murakami
They take the circuits out of people's brains that make it possible for them to think for themselves. Their world is like the one that George Orwell depicted in his novel. I'm sure you realize that there are plenty of people who are looking for exactly that kind of brain death. It makes life a lot easier. You don't have to think about difficult things, just shut up and do what your superiors tell you to do.

Haruki Murakami
Friends don't need the intervention of a third party. Friendship's a voluntary thing.

Haruki Murakami
In most cases learning something essential in life requires physical pain.

Haruki Murakami
Time weighs down on you like an old, ambiguous dream. You keep on moving, trying to sleep through it. But even if you go to the ends of the earth, you won't be able to escape it. Still, you have to go there- to the edge of the world. There's something you can't do unless you get there.

Haruki Murakami
Either I'm funny or the world's funny. I don't know which. The bottle and lid don't fit. It could be the bottle's fault or the lid's fault. In either case, there's no denying that the fit is bad.

Haruki Murakami
It doesn't matter how old I get, but as long as I continue to live I'll always discover something new about myself.

Haruki Murakami
Everybody has to start somewhere. You have your whole future ahead of you. Perfection doesn't happen right away.

Haruki Murakami
I want to believe you, but if that's true, I just don't get it. Why does loving somebody mean you have to hurt them just as much? I mean, if that's the way it goes, what's the point of loving someone?

Haruki Murakami
Most people are not looking for provable truths. As you said, truth is often accompanied by intense pain, and almost no one is looking for painful truths. What people need is beautiful, comforting stories that make them feel as if their lives have some meaning. Which is where religion comes from.

Haruki Murakami
Let the world move along as it pleased. If it had any business with him, it would be sure to tell him.

Haruki Murakami
Letters are just pieces of paper," I said. "Burn them, and what stays in your heart will stay; keep them, and what vanishes will vanish.

Haruki Murakami
Of course you keep telling yourself there's something to be learned from everything, and growing old shouldn't be that hard. That's the general drift.

Haruki Murakami
So this was how secrets got started, I thought to myself. People constructed them little by little. I had not intended to keep May Kasahara a secret from Kumiko. My relationship with her was not that big a deal, finally: whether I mentioned it or not was of no consequence. Once it had flown down a certain delicate channel, however, it had become cloaked in the opacity of secretiveness, whatever my original "intention" had have been.

Haruki Murakami
If there's something I can't do but want to, I won't relax until I'm able to do it.

Haruki Murakami
But intolerant, narrow minds with no imagination are like parasites that transform the host, change form, and continue to thrive. They're a lost cause, and I don't want anyone like that coming in here.

Haruki Murakami
You're afraid of imagination and even more afraid of dreams. Afraid of the resposibility that begins in dreams. But you have to sleep and dreams are a part of sleep. When you're awake you can suppress imagination but you can't supress dreams.

Haruki Murakami
The morning air of the pasture turned steadily cooler. Day by day, the bright golden leaves of the birches turned more spotted as the first winds of winter slipped between the withered branches and across the highlands toward the southeast. Stopping in the center of the pasture, I could hear the winds clearly. No turning back, they pronounced. The brief autumn was gone.

Haruki Murakami
Money had no name of course. And if it did have a name, it would no longer be money. What gave money its true meaning was its dark-night namelessness, its breathtaking interchangeability.

Haruki Murakami
I'm a coward when it comes to matters of the heart. That is my fatal flaw.

Haruki Murakami
You can keep as quiet as you like, but one of these days somebody is going to find you.

Haruki Murakami
Someone once said that nothing costs more and yields less benefit than revenge, Aomame said. Winston Churchill. As I recall it, though, he was making excuses for the British Empire's budget deficits. It has no moral significance.

Haruki Murakami
The thing I'm most afraid of is me. Of not knowing what I'm going to do. Of not knowing what I'm doing right now

Haruki Murakami
The ocean was one of the greatest things he had ever seen in his life—bigger and deeper than anything he had imagined. It changed its color and shape and expression according to time and place and weather. It aroused a deep sadness in his heart, and at the same time it brought his heart peace and comfort.

Haruki Murakami