Haruki Murakami Quotes

539 Sourced Quotes

The sky grew darker, painted blue on blue, one stroke at a time, into deeper and deeper shades of night.

Haruki Murakami
You couldn't begin to imagine who I am, where I'm going, or what I'm about to do, All of you are trapped here. You can't go anywhere, forward or back. But I'm not like you. I have work to do. I have a mission to accomplish. And so, with your permission, I shall move ahead.

Haruki Murakami
I'm kind of a low-key guy. The spotlight doesn't suit me. I'm more of a side dish—cole slaw or French fries or a Wham! backup singer.

Haruki Murakami
This was never any place I was meant to be. This isn't a place for me.

Haruki Murakami
Exhaustion pays no mind to age or beauty. Like rain and earthquakes and hail and floods.

Haruki Murakami
A girl doesn't always want to go out, you know, Mr. Wind-Up Bird. Sometimes she feels like being nasty—like, if the guy's gonna wait, let him really wait.

Haruki Murakami
Now and then may not be enough…You have to enjoy it while you're still young. enjoy it to the fullest. You can use the memories of what you did to warm your body after you get old and can't do it anymore.

Haruki Murakami
You are a beautiful person, Doctor. Clearheaded. Strong. But you seem always to be dragging your heart along the ground. From now on, little by little, you must prepare yourself to face death. If you devote all of your future energy to living, you will not be able to die well. You must begin to shift gears, a little at a time. Living and dying are, in a sense, of equal value.

Haruki Murakami
Our faces were no more than ten inches apart but she was lightyears away from me.

Haruki Murakami
I'm not going to get involved in a debate with you. Just remember this: the gods give, and the gods take away. Even if you are not aware of having been granted what you posses, the gods remember what they gave you. They don't forget a thing. You should use the abilities you have been granted with the utmost care.

Haruki Murakami
Many are the women who can take their clothes off seductively, but women who can charm as they dress?

Haruki Murakami
I'd made it back to the land of the living. No matter how boring or mediocre a world it might be, this was it.

Haruki Murakami
Unclose your mind. You are not a prisoner. You are a bird in fight, searching the skies for dreams.

Haruki Murakami
My very existence, my life in the world, seemed like a hallucination. A strong wind would make me think my body was about to be blown to the end of the earth, to some land I had never seen or heard of, where my mind and body would separate forever. Hold tight, I would tell myself, but there was nothing for me to hold on to.

Haruki Murakami
People have their own reasons for dying. It might look simple, but it never is. It's just like a rock. What's above ground is only a small part of it. But if you start pulling, it keeps coming and coming. The human mind dwells deep in darkness. Only the person himself knows the real reason, and maybe not even then.

Haruki Murakami
When I'm running I don't have to talk to anybody and don't have to listen to anybody. This is a part of my day I can't do without.

Haruki Murakami
And it came to me then. That we were wonderful traveling companions but in the end no more than lonely lumps of metal in their own separate orbits. From far off they look like beautiful shooting stars, but in reality they're nothing more than prisons, where each of us is locked up alone, going nowhere. When the orbits of these two satellites of ours happened to cross paths, we could be together. Maybe even open our hearts to each other. But that was only for the briefest moment. In the next instant we'd be in absolute solitude. Until we burned up and became nothing.

Haruki Murakami
There had to be something wrong with my life. I should have been born a Yugoslavian shepherd who looked up at the Big Dipper every night.

Haruki Murakami
What was lost was lost. There was no retrieving it, however you schemed, no returning to how things were, no going back.

Haruki Murakami
The answer is dreams. Dreaming on and on. Entering the world of dreams and never coming out. Living in dreams for the rest of time.

Haruki Murakami
This is what it means to live on. When granted hope, a person uses it as fuel, as a guidepost to life. It is impossible to live without hope.

Haruki Murakami
I wonder how it turns out that we all lead such different lives. Take you and your sister, for example. You're born to the same parents, you grow up in the same household, you're both girls. How do you end up with such wildly different personalities?...One puts on a bikini like little semaphore flags and lies by the pool looking sexy, and the other puts on her school bathing suit and swims her heart out like a dolphin...

Haruki Murakami
I'm me, and at the same time not me. That's what it felt like. A very still, quiet feeling.

Haruki Murakami
Listen up—there's no war that will end all wars,' Crow tells me. 'War breeds war. Lapping up the blood shed by violence, feeding on wounded flesh. War is a perfect, self-contained being. You need to know that.

Haruki Murakami
But still," Ayumi said, "it seems to me that this world has a serious shortage of both logic and kindness." "You may be right," Aomame said, "But it's too late to trade it in for another one.

Haruki Murakami
To know one's own state is not a simple matter. One cannot look directly at one's own face with one's own eyes, for example. One has no choice but to look at one's reflection in the mirror. Through experience, we come to believe that the image is correct, but that is all.

Haruki Murakami
The others in the dorm thought I wanted to be a writer, because I was always alone with a book, but I had no such ambition. There was nothing I wanted to be.

Haruki Murakami
Of what value is a civilization that can't toast a piece of bread as ordered?

Haruki Murakami
Time flows in strange ways on Sundays, and sights become mysteriously distorted.

Haruki Murakami
So the fact that I'm me and no one else is one of my greatest assets. Emotional hurt is the price a person has to pay in order to be independent.

Haruki Murakami