Haruki Murakami Quotes

539 Sourced Quotes

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

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

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
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
Memories warm you up from the inside. But they also tear you apart.

Haruki Murakami
She was beautiful and seemingly quite intelligent, what with her pentameter search system. There wasn't a reason in the world not to find her appealing.

Haruki Murakami
Suicides? Heart attacks? The papers didn't seem interested. The world was full of ways to die, too many to cover. Newsworthy deaths had to be exceptional. Most people go unobserved.

Haruki Murakami
Overhead, the two moons worked together to bathe the world in a strange light.

Haruki Murakami
In this world, there are things you can only do alone, and things you can only do with somebody else. It's important to combine the two in just the right amount.

Haruki Murakami
I don't really know if it's the right thing to do, making new life. Kids grow up, generations take their place. What does it all come to? More hills bulldozed and more ocean fronts filled in? Faster cars and more cats run over? Who needs it?

Haruki Murakami
I can be hurt, you know. I can get as exhausted as anybody else. I can feel so bad I want to cry, too.

Haruki Murakami
As with marathon runs and lengths of toilet paper, there had to be standards to measure up to.

Haruki Murakami
Judging the mistakes of strangers is an easy thing to do - and it feels pretty good.

Haruki Murakami
It is the same with anything - you have to learn through your own experience, paying your own way. You can't learn it from a book.

Haruki Murakami
Then she took my hand and touched it to the wound beside her eye. I caressed the half-inch scar. As I did so, the waves of her consciousness pulsed through my fingertips and into me - a delicate resonance of longing. Probably someone should take this girl in his arms and hold her tight, I thought. Probably someone other than me. Someone qualified to give her something. "Goodbye, Mr. Wind-Up Bird. See you again sometime.

Haruki Murakami
You said that the mind is like the wind but perhaps it is we who are like the wind Knowing nothing, simply blowing through. Never aging, never dying.

Haruki Murakami
I've always liked libraries. They're quiet and full of books and full of knowledge.

Haruki Murakami
No truth can cure the sorrow we feel from losing a loved one. No truth, no sincerity, no strength, no kindness can cure that sorrow. All we can do is see it through to the end and learn something from it, but what we learn will be no help in facing the next sorrow that comes to us without warning.

Haruki Murakami