Haruki Murakami Quotes

539 Sourced Quotes

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
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
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
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
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
Better to be a first-class matchbox than a second-class match.

Haruki Murakami
Her smile steps offstage for a moment, then does an encore, all while I'm dealing with my blushing face.

Haruki Murakami
Even castles in the sky can do with a fresh coat of paint.

Haruki Murakami
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
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
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
Even if we could turn back, we'd probably never end up where we started.

Haruki Murakami
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
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
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
Not that we were incompatible: we just had nothing to talk about.

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

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

Haruki Murakami