Top 100 Haruki Murakami Quotes
#1. If one operates on the principle that everything can be a learning experience, then of course aging needn't be so painful."
-from "Hear the Wind Sing
Haruki Murakami
#2. No matter how hard you try to put everything neatly into shape, the context wanders this way and that, until finally the context isn't even there anymore. You're left with this pile of kittens lolling all over one another.
Haruki Murakami
#3. When you introduce things that most readers have never seen before into a piece of fiction, you have to describe them with as much precision and in as much detail as possible. What you can eliminate from fiction is the description of things that most readers have seen.
Haruki Murakami
#4. I watched her long, straight hair swaying right and left where it met her shoulders.
Haruki Murakami
#5. In my case, if I start out by thinking about the plot, things don't go well. Small points, such as my impression of what is likely to occur, do come to mind, but I let the rest of the story take its own course. I don't want to spend as long as two years writing a story whose plot I already know.
Haruki Murakami
#6. I used to run a full marathon in three hours and 25 or 26 minutes. Not any more.
Haruki Murakami
#7. She curled up and pressed her cheek against his chest. Her ear was right above his heart. She was listening to his thoughts. "I need to know this," Aomame said. "That we're in the same world, seeing the same things.
Haruki Murakami
#8. Eventually, Malta Kano withdrew her hand from mine and took several deep breaths. Then she nodded several times. "Mr. Okada," she said, "I believe that you are entering a phase of your life in which many different things will occur. The disappearance of your cat is only the beginning.
Haruki Murakami
#9. I don't give a damn about what people say. They can be reptile food for all I care.
Haruki Murakami
#10. I see many people who disguise themselves. I know some people who say, "I'm an artist, I'm very creative, I'm different from ordinary people." But I don't believe those people. I like to see the strangeness or weirdness in ordinary people or ordinary scenery or ordinary, everyday life.
Haruki Murakami
#11. 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
#12. I'm thinking it would be wonderful if I could follow you into that world where you're going." "And leave this world behind?" "That's right," she said. "It's a boring old world anyway. I'm sure it'd be much more fun living in your consciousness.
Haruki Murakami
#13. Experience has taught me this: you've done everything you needed to do, and there's no sense in rehashing it. All you can do now is wait for the race. And what instinct has taught me is one thing only: use your imagination.
Haruki Murakami
#15. Nothingness means there's absolutely nothing, so maybe there's no need to understand it or imagine it.
Haruki Murakami
#16. Just speak your mind honestly. That's the best thing. It may hurt a little sometimes, and someone may get upset, but in the long run, it's for the best.
Haruki Murakami
#17. Just beyond the edges of our little circle of sunshine, a ferocious war was going on.
Haruki Murakami
#18. I look around me sometimes and I get sick to my stomach. Why the hell don't these bastards do something? I wonder. They don't do a fucking thing, and then they moan about it.
Haruki Murakami
#19. It was a lovely uneventful spring evening. The sky grew darker, painted blue on blue, one stroke at a time, into deeper and deeper shades of night. When
Haruki Murakami
#20. Let the wind change direction a little bit, and their cries turned to whispers.
Haruki Murakami
#21. It's easy to talk big, but the important thing is whether or not you clean up the shit.
Haruki Murakami
#22. I'm pretty used to losing. There are plenty of things in this world that are way beyond me, plenty of opponents I can never beat. Not to brag, but these girls probably don't know as much as I do about pain. And, quite naturally, there might not be a need for them to know it.
Haruki Murakami
#23. I don't know, it's stupid being 20," she said. "I'm just not ready. It feels weird. Like somebody's pushing me from behind.
Haruki Murakami
#24. Opera lovers may be the narrowest people in the world.
Haruki Murakami
#25. I just wanted to write something about running, but I realized that to write about my running is to write about my writing. It's a parallel thing in me.
Haruki Murakami
#26. That's how it is with art. Mere humans who root through their refrigerators at three o'clock in the morning are incapable of such writing.
Haruki Murakami
#27. It's difficult to teach how to write novels, but teaching swimming is just as hard.
Haruki Murakami
#28. When Debussy was seeming to get nowhere with an opera he was composing, he put it this way: "I spent my days pursuing the nothingness -le rien - it creates." My job is to create that void, that rien.
Hunting knife
Haruki Murakami
#29. If I ever get reincarnated, let me make certain I don't come back as a paperclip.
Haruki Murakami
#30. It was far too hot to think about complicated matters.
Haruki Murakami
#31. Habit, in fact, was what propelled his life forward. Though he no longer believed in a perfect community, nor felt the warmth of chemistry between people.
Haruki Murakami
#33. The dead will always be dead, but we have to go on living.
Haruki Murakami
#34. There is another capital beneath the waves, She plunged ten thousand fathoms beneath the sea.
Haruki Murakami
#35. The world kept moving on; I alone was at a standstill.
Haruki Murakami
#36. sunbeams everywhere and mist floating like freshly minted
Haruki Murakami
#38. Everything was bathed in the white, unreal light of the moon, the yard like the wet bottom of a sea from which the water has just been suddenly removed.
Haruki Murakami
#39. And when you come back to Japan next summer, let's have that date or whatever you want to call it. We can go to the zoo or the botanical garden or the aquarium, and then we'll have the most politically correct and scrumptious omelets we can find.
Haruki Murakami
#40. I'm me, and at the same time not me. That's what it felt like. A very still, quiet feeling.
Haruki Murakami
#42. It seemed to her that almost everything she possessed had its roots sunk in that dark soil and was deriving its nourishment from it.
Haruki Murakami
#43. Jealousy was not a place he was forced into by someone else, but a jail in which the inmate entered voluntarily, locked the door, and threw away the key.
Haruki Murakami
#44. He wasn't a talkative man to begin with, and in all aspects of life - as though it were a kind of mouth infection he wanted to avoid catching - he never talked about his feelings.
Haruki Murakami
#45. The narrower a man's intellectual grasp, the more power he is able to grab in this country. I tell you, Lieutenant, there is only one way to survive here. And that is not to imagine anything.
Haruki Murakami
#46. People are drawn deeper into tragedy not by their defects but by their virtues.
Haruki Murakami
#47. All of us are imperfect human beings living in an imperfect world.
Haruki Murakami
#48. The sad fact is that language and logic cut off from reality have a far greater power than the language and logic of reality - with all that extraneous matter weighing down like a rock on any actions we take. In
Haruki Murakami
#49. If you listen carefully, you can hear these things. If you look carefully, you'll see what you're after
Haruki Murakami
#50. The curious thing about individuals is that their singularity always goes beyond any category or generalization in the book.
Haruki Murakami
#53. For a certain kind of person, love begins from something tiny or silly.
From something like that or it doesn't begin at all.
Haruki Murakami
#54. When that girl left, she left behind this void. No, maybe not. Maybe she just showed me something that was already there, inside me.
Haruki Murakami
#55. I am, indeed, pure Frog, but at the same time I am a thing that stands for a world of un-Frog.
Haruki Murakami
#56. There are three ways you can get along with a girl: one, shut up and listen to what she has to say; two, tell her you like what she's wearing; and three, treat her to really good food ... If you do all that and still don't get the results you want, better give up.
Haruki Murakami
#57. If I had my way, me too," Sumire said, beaming. "But what
can you do? Wonderful things always come to an end.
Haruki Murakami
#59. What I mean to say is that in a highly exceptional reality [ ... ] the non-exceptional can, for convenience sake, be written off as paradoxically exceptional.
Haruki Murakami
#61. Like someone excitedly relating a story, only to find the words petering out, the path gets narrower the further I go, the undergrowth taking over.
Haruki Murakami
#62. They weren't fact. They were possibility. Nothing more, nothing less, but the force of the possibility was shattering.
Haruki Murakami
#63. People who's freedom is taken away always end up hating somebody. Right? I know I don't want to live like that.
Haruki Murakami
#64. They knew the difference between thoroughness and overkill. It was like Jay Gatsby's library: the books were real, but the pages were uncut.
Haruki Murakami
#65. What I'd like to be is a unique writer who's different from everybody else. I want to be a writer who tells stories unlike other writers'.
Haruki Murakami
#66. It doesnt happen very often, but sometimes, before i even realize what's going on, there i am - naked and defenseless and totally confused
Haruki Murakami
#67. I thought about Kizuki. "So you finally made Naoko yours," I heard myself telling him. Oh, well, she was yours to begin with. Now maybe, she's where she belongs. But in this world, in this imperfect world of the living, I did the best I could for Naoko.
Haruki Murakami
#68. I didn't read so much Japanese literature. Because my father was a teacher of Japanese literature, I just wanted to do something else.
Haruki Murakami
#69. [ ... ] Shimamoto had her own little world within her. A world that was for her alone, one I could not enter.
Haruki Murakami
#70. Dreams are things from the past. They aren't from the future. That wasn't you imprisoned there. You imprison your dreams. You understand?
Yeah, I'd say. But I wasn't convinced.
Haruki Murakami
#71. 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
#72. 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
#73. I still have that fear, even now - that suddenly my very existence will be denied and, through no fault of my own, I'll be hurled into the night sea once more. Maybe that's why I haven't been able to form deep relationships with people. I always keep a distance between me and others." He
Haruki Murakami
#74. Languages are like games. You learn the rules for one, and they all work the same way. Like women.
Haruki Murakami
#75. A golf course can be a very risky place in the early evening for those who aren't aware of the dangers. Who knows when a golf ball might come flying out of nowhere?
Haruki Murakami
#76. But I don't have any confidence ."
"Why not ?"
"Because I have no sense of self . I have no personality , no brilliant color . I have nothing to offer . That's always been my problem . I feel like an empty vessel . I have a shape , I guess , as a container but there's nothing inside .
Haruki Murakami
#77. The weather service reported that there weren't any atmospheric conditions present that might have led to fish raining from the sky.
Haruki Murakami
#78. Judging the mistakes of strangers is an easy thing to do - and it feels pretty good.
Haruki Murakami
#79. We each have a special something we can get only at a special time of our life. like a small flame. A careful, fortunate few cherish that flame, nurture it, hold it as a torch to light their way. But once that flame goes out, it's gone forever.
Haruki Murakami
#80. I never made any plan before writing, however I succeeded. I enjoyed writing with excitement ,"what happen on the next page?"
Haruki Murakami
#81. People change,' Sara said.
'True enough,' Tsukuru said. 'People do change. And no matter how close we once were, and how much we opened up to each other, maybe neither of us knew anything substantial about the other.
Haruki Murakami
#83. The most dangerous creature here would have to be me. So maybe I'm just scared of my own shadow.
Haruki Murakami
#84. He considered using the time to think, but he couldn't think of anything to think about.
Haruki Murakami
#85. April and May were painful, lonely months for me because I couldn't talk to you. I never knew that spring could be so painful and lonely. Better to have three Februaries than a spring like this.
Haruki Murakami
#86. People die all the time. Life is a lot more fragile than we think. So you should treat others in a way that leaves no regrets. Fairly, and if possible, sincerely. It's too easy not to make the effort, then weep and wring your hands after the person dies.
Haruki Murakami
#87. Aomame closed her eyes and, in a split second, reviewed the long span of years as if standing on the edge of a sheer cliff, surveying an ocean channel below. She could smell the sea. She could hear the deep sighing of the wind.
Haruki Murakami
#88. Sex with a married woman ten years his senior was stress free and fulfilling, because it couldn't lead to anything
Haruki Murakami
#89. Time came slowly and passed slowly, so leisurely that at times he could swear it had stealthily doubled back on itself.
Haruki Murakami
#90. You have to be practical. So every time I say, if you want to write a novel you have to be practical, people get bored. They are disappointed. They are expecting a more dynamic, creative, artistic thing to say. What I want to say is: you have to be practical.
Haruki Murakami
#92. People don't just die when their time comes. They gradually die away, from the inside.
Haruki Murakami
#93. I am struck by how, except when you're young, you really need to prioritize in life, figuring out in what order you should divide up your time and energy. If you don't get that sort of system set by a certain age, you'll lack focus and your life will be out of balance.
Haruki Murakami
#94. It is my huge pleasure that my novels are translated into languages that are read among small numbers of people.
Haruki Murakami
#96. Things are so convenient for us these days, our perceptions are probably that much duller. Even if its the same moon hanging in the sky, we may be looking at something quite different. Four hundred years ago, we might have had richer spirits that were closer to nature.
Haruki Murakami
#98. Good-bye, she murmured, bidding farewell not so much to the apartment as to the self that had lived here.
Haruki Murakami
#99. He does not exist here, with me, but flesh that does not exist will never die, and promises unmade are never broken.
Haruki Murakami
#100. Are you prepared to die?"
"I am half dead already," Nimit said as if stating the obvious.
Haruki Murakami
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