Top 100 Life Murakami Quotes
#1. Still, the time I spent with her was more precious than anything. She helped me forget the undertone of loneliness in my life. She expanded the outer edges of my world, helped me draw a deep, soothing breath. Only Sumire could do that for me.
Haruki Murakami
#2. Sometimes when I think of life, I feel like a piece of driftwood washed up on shore.
Haruki Murakami
#3. You will be turning thirty soon, Mr. Kawana, which means that, from now on, you will gradually enter that twilight portion of life - you will be getting older.
Haruki Murakami
#4. In his own way, he's lived life with all the intensity he could muster.
Haruki Murakami
#5. He comes out of the mine about the same as when he went in. He has no sense that it was something he decided to do himself, or that he had a choice. He's like totally passive. But I think in real life people are like that. It's not so easy to make choices on your own.
Haruki Murakami
#6. Am I happy? All I can say is I guess so. That's pretty much the way it is with dreams.
Haruki Murakami
#8. It was simply one of those things that remain as an "exceptional but interesting" episode in life.
Haruki Murakami
#9. I also happened to identify with Julien Sorel. Sorel's basic character flaws had all cemented by the age of fifteen, a fact which further elicited my sympathy. To have all the building blocks of your life in place by that age was, by any standard, a tragedy.
Haruki Murakami
#10. Everybody feels like that to some extent," I said. "They're trying to express themselves and it bothers them when they can't get it right.
Haruki Murakami
#11. Being alive, if you had to define it, meant emitting a variety of smells
Haruki Murakami
#12. What's more, you're loads better than you think you are."
"So why is it I get to thinking that way?" I puzzled.
"That's because you're only half-living." she said briskly. "The other half is still untapped somewhere.
Haruki Murakami
#13. I don't care what you do to me, but I don't want you to hurt me. I've had enough hurt already in my life. More than enough. Now I want to be happy.
Haruki Murakami
#14. I've never once thought about how I was going to die," she said. "I can't think about it. I don't even know how I'm going to live.
Haruki Murakami
#15. The resounding stillness gives the structures an impression of abandonment. Yet each time I turn down these streets, I can sense strangers behind the facades, holding their breath as they continue pursuits I will never know.
Haruki Murakami
#16. Humans are immortal in their thought. Though strictly speakin', not immortal, but endlessly, asymptotically close to immortal. That's eternal life.
Haruki Murakami
#17. In most cases learning something essential in life requires physical pain.
Haruki Murakami
#18. This was the second stage in my life, a step in my personal evolution
abandoning the idea of being different, and settling for normal ... Gradually I drew nearer to the world, and the world drew nearer to me.
Haruki Murakami
#19. Life is not like water. Things in life don't necessarily flow over the shortest possible route.
Haruki Murakami
#20. No matter how shallow and dull things might get, this life is worth living.
Haruki Murakami
#21. From the moment of my birth, I lived with pain at the center of my life. My only purpose in life was to find a way to coexist with intense pain.
Haruki Murakami
#22. It's easy to talk big, but the important thing is whether or not you clean up the shit.
Haruki Murakami
#23. Generally, people who are good at writing letters have no need to write letters. They've got plenty of life to lead inside their own context.
Haruki Murakami
#24. Among the many values in life, I appreciate freedom most.
Haruki Murakami
#25. What they were after wasn't further complexification or sophistication of existing methods, but unprecedented technology. Wasn't the kind of thinkin' you get from workaday university lab scholars, publish-or-perishin' and countin' their pay. The truly original scientist is a free individual.
Haruki Murakami
#26. When you get used to that kind of life - of never having anything you want - then you stop knowing what it is you want.
Haruki Murakami
#27. But finally, Mr. Wind-Up Bird, isn't that just what life is? Aren't we all trapped in the dark somewhere, and they've taken away our food and water, and we're slowly dying, little by little ... ?
Haruki Murakami
#28. Of course, they're not clowning around trying to make me laugh. They're doing their best to live very serious lives, and they just happen to fall down sometimes. I think that's cool.
Haruki Murakami
#29. As long as possible, I would really like to complete one marathon per year. Though my time has been slowing down as I get older, it has become a very important part of my life.
Haruki Murakami
#30. Imagine The Greatest Hits of Bobby Darin minus 'Mack the Knife.' That's what my life would be like without you.
Haruki Murakami
#31. May the life you lead be a good one, a life free of regrets.
Haruki Murakami
#32. Vacations and friends are the two best things in life.
Haruki Murakami
#33. Now that you've said hello, I'm afraid we move right into farewells. Hello, goodbye. Like flowers scattered in a storm, man's life is one long farewell, as they say,
Haruki Murakami
#34. People lose fifty million skin cells every day. The cells get scraped off and turn into invisible dust, and disappear into the air. Maybe we are nothing but skin cells as far as the world is concerned.
Haruki Murakami
#35. 1971 was the year of spaghetti.
In 1971 I cooked spaghetti to live, and lived to cook spaghetti. Steam rising from the pot was my pride and joy, tomato sauce bubbling up in the saucepan my one great hope in life ...
This is the story from the Year of Spaghetti, AD 1971.
Haruki Murakami
#36. Maybe it's been like that for you till now. But you're not a kid anymore. You have the right to choose your own life. You can start again. If you want a cat, all you have to do is choose a life in which you can have a cat. It's simple. It's your right ... right?
Haruki Murakami
#37. When I was with him, I felt as if my life had finally come back to me.
Haruki Murakami
#38. Some things can only be done in exchange for life," the man said.
Haruki Murakami
#39. I've always done whatever I felt like doing in life. People may try to stop me, and convince me I'm wrong, but I won't change.
Haruki Murakami
#40. Any religion that would prohibit life-saving surgery simply because it goes against the literal word of the Bible cane nothing other than a cult. This is an abuse of dogma that crosses the line.
Haruki Murakami
#41. I don't think it's a question of liking or disliking it," Tengo said ... "It was the one thing he was best at." "Hmm. I see," Kumi said. She pondered this. "But that might very well be the best way to live your life.
Haruki Murakami
#42. I wake up, but where? I don't just think this, I actually voice the question to myself: "Where am I?" As if I didn't know: I'm here. In my life. A feature of the world that is my existence.
Haruki Murakami
#43. Most everything you think you know about me is nothing more than memories.
Haruki Murakami
#44. Cops, Hoshino concluded, not for the first time in his life, are just gangsters who get paid by the state.
Haruki Murakami
#45. 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
#46. There is some risk, of course. But risk is the spice of life.
Haruki Murakami
#47. My life ended when I was 20. Since then it's been merely a series of endless reminiscences, a dark, winding corridor leading nowhere. Nevertheless, I had to live it, surviving each empty day, seeing each day off still empty.
Haruki Murakami
#48. A revelation leaps over the borders of the everyday. A life without revelation is no life at all.
Haruki Murakami
#49. At the same time that 'I' am the content of a relation, 'I' am also that which does the relating.
Haruki Murakami
#50. Lady #1, Maki, had never once given any thought to what was really right for her in her life, simply believing that if she surrounded herself with super-exclusive things, she'd become a super-exclusive person.
Ryu Murakami
#51. It's just a feeling I have. What you see with your eyes is not necessarily real. My enemy is, among other things, the me inside me.
Haruki Murakami
#52. There in the dim light, staring at the shadow on the wall, I poured out the story of my life. ( ... ) How nothing touched me. And I touched nothing. How I'd lost track of what mattered. How I worked like a fool for things that didn't. How it didn't make a difference either way.
Haruki Murakami
#53. But think about it -what if there were a deus ex machina in real life? Everything would be so easy! If you felt stuck or trapped, some god would swing down from up there and solve all your problems. What could be easier than that?
Haruki Murakami
#54. It was the age, that time of life when every sight, every feeling, every thought came back, like a boomerang, to me.
Haruki Murakami
#55. It was the greatest stroke of good fortune he had ever encountered in life. In other words, he had finally worked his way up to the lowest spot on the totem pole.
Haruki Murakami
#56. 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
#57. It was a matter of my not losing out on life. It's too easy to let yourself get ground down by those who give you shit.
Haruki Murakami
#58. It's not as if our lives are simply divided into light and dark. There's a shadowy middle ground. Recognizing and understanding the shadows is what a healthy intelligence does.
Haruki Murakami
#59. I get irritated, I get upset. Especially when I'm in a hurry. But I see it all as part of our training. To get irritated is to lose our way in life.
Haruki Murakami
#60. He was going to die soon, you knew when you saw those eyes. There was no sign of life in his flesh, just the barest traces of what had once been a life. His body was like a dilapidated old house from which all furniture and fixtures have been removed and which awaited now only its final demolition.
Haruki Murakami
#61. Another person's life is that person's life. You can't take responsibility.
Haruki Murakami
#62. But the pain I felt was excruciating. It was as if my life had ended. Here I was in my early twenties and the best part of my life was over. Do you see how terrible that would be? I had suc potential, then woke up one day and it had gone.
Haruki Murakami
#63. A child should learn from early on what kind of activity supported his daily life, and he should appreciate the importance of labor. Tengo
Haruki Murakami
#64. 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
#65. 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
#66. She and I were bound together at the border between life and death. It was like that for us from the start
Haruki Murakami
#67. You've already decided what you're going to do, and all that's left is to set the wheels in motion. I mean, it's your life. Basically, you gotta go with what you think is right.
Haruki Murakami
#68. Every one of us is losing something precious to us. Lost opportunities, lost possibilities, feelings we can never get back again. That's part of what it means to be alive.
Haruki Murakami
#69. I spent thirty-three years in another man's shadow. I went everywhere he went, I helped him with everything he did. I was in a sense a part of him. When you live like that for a long time, you gradually lose track of what it is you yourself really want out of life
Haruki Murakami
#70. Unsure how to answer, I took another grape. Time was no problem for me, but I wasn't eager to hear the long life story of a dwarf. And besides, this was a dream. It could evaporate any moment.
Haruki Murakami
#71. But listen to me
there are times in life when those kinds of excuses don't cut it anymore. Situations when nobody cares whether you're suited for the task at hand or not.
Haruki Murakami
#72. Those were strange days, now that I look back at them. In the midst of life, everything revolved around death.
Haruki Murakami
#73. There are all kinds of things we have to deal with in life," Eri finally said. "And one thing always seems to connect with another. You try to solve one problem, only to find that another one you hadn't anticipated arises instead. It's not that easy to get free of them.
Haruki Murakami
#74. I believed in all seriousness that by converting my life into numbers I might be able to get through to people. That having something to communicate could stand as proof I really existed.
Haruki Murakami
#75. Your life's just begun and there's a ton of things out in the world you've never laid eyes on. Things you never could imagine.
Haruki Murakami
#76. Something will work out tomorrow, I thought. And if not, then tomorrow I'll do some thinking. Ob - la-di, ob-la-da, life goes on.
Haruki Murakami
#77. 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
#78. He would eventually have to pass through the forest, but he felt no fear. Of course - the forest was inside him, he knew, and it made him who he was.
Haruki Murakami
#80. Most human activities are predicated on the assumption that life goes on. If you take that premise away, what is there left?
Haruki Murakami
#81. It was as if I were writing letters to hold together the pieces of my crumbling life.
Haruki Murakami
#82. No matter how much suffering you went through, you never wanted to let go of those memories.
Haruki Murakami
#83. Tsukuru nodded. Coming up with witty sayings about life seemed, after all, to be a trait shared by all Finns. The long winters might have something to do with it.
Haruki Murakami
#84. Her greatest joy in life was knowing that her importance to the team was by no means small and that, as narrow as that world might be, she had been granted a definite place in it. Someone needed her.
Haruki Murakami
#85. No matter what form the relationship might take, he was the only person she could picture sharing her life with.
Haruki Murakami
#86. You're not a kid anymore. You have the right to choose your own life. You can start again. If you want a cat, all you have to do is choose a life in which you can have a cat. It's simple. It's your right.
Haruki Murakami
#87. Afterward, Tsukuru Tazaki's life was changed forever, as if a sheer ridge had divided the original vegetation into two distinct biomes.
Haruki Murakami
#88. a question is embarrassing for a moment, but not asking is embarrassing for a lifetime
Haruki Murakami
#89. I don't know what kind of life you had, what sorts of joys and sorrows you experienced. But even if there was something that left you unfulfilled, you can't go around seeking it at other people's doors. Even if it is at the place you're most familiar with, and the sort of act that is your forte.
Haruki Murakami
#90. Everything has boundaries. The same holds true with thought. You shouldn't fear boundaries, but you should not be afraid of destroying them. That's what is most important if you want to be free: respect for and exasperation with boundaries.
Haruki Murakami
#91. Like flowers scattered in a storm, a man's life is a long farewell.
Haruki Murakami
#92. Nobody's going to win all the time. On the highway of life you can't always be in the fast lane.
Haruki Murakami
#93. An empty shell. Those were the first words that sprang to mind ... Something incredibly important - .. - had disappeared from Miu for good. Leaving behind not life, but its absence
Haruki Murakami
#94. My grandpa always said asking a question is embarrass for a moment but not asking a question is embarrasing for a life time
Haruki Murakami
#95. The truth is this: life is empty. However, help is available. If you know from the outset, it's almost as if life's not really meaningless at all.
Haruki Murakami
#96. 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
#97. Start making excuses and there's no end to it. I can't live that kind of life.
Haruki Murakami
#98. Never in my life had I seen such a slim nothing of a figure eat like such a terror.
Haruki Murakami
#99. We are not whales - and this constitutes one great theme underscoring our sex life.
Haruki Murakami
#100. One thing became crystal clear to me when I couldn't see you anymore. I realized that the only way I had been able to survive until then was having you in my life. When I lost you, the pain and loneliness really got to me.
Haruki Murakami
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