Ryū Murakami Quotes

16 Sourced Quotes

That's what violence was: emotion leaking out from consciousness into the physical world, linking up with the muscles of the arms and shoulders and diaphragm and, inevitably, the face. Stifle emotion during an act of violence and the face becomes a blank, unreadable mask.

Ryū Murakami
Buying and selling is the basis of all social intercourse, and the commodity an actor or model offered for sale was nothing less than her own being.

Ryū Murakami
I really did suffer a lot, she said, and for a lot longer than I even care to remember. I was sure I'd never find anything to take the place of ballet, and it took all my energy just to get through each day. My parents and my friends all said that time alone would heal the wound, and I guess I knew it was true, but I wished I could hibernate or something, and let time go by without having to suffer through it. But of course the clock just kept slowly ticking away. Tick, tick, tick- like it was chipping away at at me, at my life.

Ryū Murakami
You have to watch your step with women these days, Pops. She could be involved with Yakuza or something. Even some of the girls in my class — you should hear the stuff they talk about. Fifteen years old, and there's nothing they don't know. We're not in the age of Peace and Love anymore.

Ryū Murakami
Nice person, bad person — that's not the level this girl is at. I can see you're crazy about her and probably won't be able to hear this, Ao-chan, but I think you'd be better off staying away from someone like her. I can't read her exactly, but I can tell you she's either a saint or a monster. Maybe both extremes at once, but not somewhere in between.

Ryū Murakami
One of the photographs in the magazine caught his eye. A homeless youth in New York City. It was the face of a human being who'd been constructed exclusively of wounds. Not time or history or ambition, nothing but wounds. The face of a person who could probably kill someone without feeling anything whatsoever.

Ryū Murakami
My theory is that sushi and kaiseki are dishes that evolved in peaceful, prosperous times, when eating well was the normal state of affairs. In this country we have the illusion that there's always this warm, loving community we belong to, but the other side of that is a sort of exclusiveness and xenophobia, and our food reflects that.Japanese cuisine isn't inclusive at all-infact it's extremely inhospitable to outsiders, to people who don't fit into the community.

Ryū Murakami
Parents, teachers, government - they all teach you how to live the dreary, deadening life of a slave, but nobody teaches you how to live normally.

Ryū Murakami
People were infected with the concept that happiness was something outside themselves, and a new and powerful form of loneliness was born. Mix loneliness with stress and enervation, and all sorts of madness can occur. Anxiety increases, and in order to obliterate the anxiety, people turn to extreme sex, violence, and even murder.

Ryū Murakami
To distort our faces with joy, or wail and weep with sorrow, or collapse in agony, or wallow in sentimentality – wasn't an inviolable human trait but something we can lose simply by leading dull and dreary lives. 'A rich emotional life,' she'd written, 'is a privilege reserved only for the daring few'.

Ryū Murakami
Every one of a hundred thousand cities around the world had its own special sunset and it was worth going there, just once, if only to see the sun go down.

Ryū Murakami
Advertising departments, as you know, are crawling with people whose frontal lobes are so under developed that if you flatter them a bit they'll swear shit is platinum!

Ryū Murakami
Yeah, he'd said, maybe it's just my idea, but really it always hurts, the times it don't hurt is when we just forget, we just forget it hurts, you know, it's not just because my belly's all rotten, everybody always hurts. So when it really starts stabbing me, somehow I feel sort of peaceful, like I'm myself again

Ryū Murakami
In the old days, things like tropical fish or imported wineglasses weren't within reach for the average person. Now when you walked down the street you passed shop windows full of the finest quality goods from around the world. Any of these things could be yours if you were willing to sacrifice a little, and many people ended up sacrificing a lot. It's difficult to control the desire to accumulate things.

Ryū Murakami
In Japan, even when you're alone, you're never really that lonely. But the loneliness you feel among people with differently colored skin and eyes, whose language you don't even speak very well – that sort of loneliness is something you feel down to the marrow of your bones.

Ryū Murakami
And just because I've written this book, don't think I've changed. I'm like I was back then, really.

Ryū Murakami