Top 100 Quotes About Haruki Murakami
#1. I know. It's easy to forget things you don't need anymore."
Excerpt From: Haruki Murakami. "Kafka on the Shore." iBooks.
Haruki Murakami
#2. No matter how far you run. Distance might not solve anything."
Haruki Murakami. "Kafka on the Shore.".
Haruki Murakami
#3. On Seeing the 100 Percent Perfect Girl One Beautiful April Morning by Haruki Murakami.
Neil Strauss
#4. Understanding is the sum of misunderstandings. - Haruki Murakami
Michael Matera
#5. Warhol was definitely an inspiration when I was younger. I wouldn't quantify his sort of influence. I've been influenced by nature and science, and I've been influenced by people like Ernst and Rauschenberg, Cornell and Bosch and Bruegel, by writers like Haruki Murakami to Pablo Neruda to Artaud.
Dustin Yellin
#6. I find Japanese books quite baffling when I read them in translation. It's only with Haruki Murakami that I find Japanse fiction that I can understand and relate to. He's a very international writer.
Kazuo Ishiguro
#8. Perhaps the writer I've read the most of is Haruki Murakami, the Japanese writer, but I wouldn't necessarily say he's a favourite. I read him because I find his work so intriguing, but I don't necessarily feel I would follow this writer to the ends of the earth.
Shaun Tan
#9. I love books that create worlds for me that I don't want to leave. I recently lost my entire life to Haruki Murakami - 1Q84. I tell people that book ruined my life in the best possible way. I couldn't think of anything else for weeks after I read it.
Sarah Kay
#10. 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
#11. A poet might die at twenty-one, a revolutionary or a rock star at twenty four. But after that you assume everything's going to be all right. you've made it past Dead Man's Curve and you're out of the tunnel, cruising straight for your destination down a six lane highway whether you want it or not.
Haruki Murakami
#12. What the world needs is a set villain that people can point at and say, It's all your fault!
Haruki Murakami
#13. But if something did happen, it happened. Whether it's right or wrong. I accept everything that happens, and that's how I became the person I am now.
Haruki Murakami
#14. We're on the same wavelength. We're connected that way, even if I'm away from her.
Haruki Murakami
#15. All sorts of people told me their stories. Then they left, never to return, as if I were no more than a bridge they were clattering across.
Haruki Murakami
#16. When a vacuum forms, someting has to come along to fill it. Because that's what everybody does.
Haruki Murakami
#17. Head-on. With unwavering conviction and ruthlessness. Aomame
Haruki Murakami
#18. We're both looking at the same moon, in the same world. We're connected to reality by the same line. All I have to do is quietly draw it towards me.
Haruki Murakami
#19. Sad hotels existed everywhere, to be sure, but the Dolphin was in a class of its own. The Dolphin Hotel was conceptually sorry. The Dolphin Hotel was tragic.
Haruki Murakami
#20. But you can't go back now? To that orderly, harmonious, intimate place?'
He thought about this, though there was no need to. 'That place doesn't exist anymore,' he said quietly.
Haruki Murakami
#21. One uproar after another, every day. Like the whole world's turned upside down. Don't you feel bad that you're missing out? The world isn't that easily turned upside down, Haida replied. It's people who are turned upside down. I don't feel bad about missing that.
Haruki Murakami
#22. And I really wanted to see you, too," she said. "When I couldn't see you any more, I realized that. It was as clear as if the planets all of a sudden lined up in a row for me. I really need you. You're a part of me; I'm a part of you.
Haruki Murakami
#23. Why do I act like this, agreeing when I really disagree, letting people force me to do things I don't want to do?
Haruki Murakami
#24. There's no such thing as perfect writing, just like there's no such thing as perfect despair.
Haruki Murakami
#25. All I wanted was to go off to some other world, a place beyond anybody's reach. A place beyond the flow of time.
Haruki Murakami
#26. I want to find my way to where you are-you, the Kumiko who wants me to rescue her ... I wanted to let you know that. I'm getting closer to where you are, and I intend to get closer still.
Haruki Murakami
#27. That is dreamreading. As the birds leave south or north in their season, the Dreamreader has dreams to read.
Haruki Murakami
#28. 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
#29. If I'm going to merely ramble, maybe I should just snuggle under the warm covers, think of Miu, and play with myself.
Haruki Murakami
#30. If you hurt her any more than you already have, the wound could be too deep to fix.
Haruki Murakami
#31. This time sleep came to take me - a deep sleep that all but pulled me by the ankles to the bottom of the sea.
Haruki Murakami
#33. I was at the bottom of the sea, the pressure dense, crushing, inexorable. Dead silence strained against my eardrums. The darkness was without reprieve. No mental adjustment could make it less absolute. It was impenetrable - black painted over black painted over black.
Haruki Murakami
#34. Either I'm funny or the world's funny. I don't know which. The bottle and lid don't fit. It could be the bottle's fault or the lid's fault. In either case, there's no denying that the fit is bad.
Haruki Murakami
#35. But no one was asking me. I was here to do a job, and gray steel lockers or pale peach jukebox was no business of mine.
Haruki Murakami
#38. He liked doing research in the library. He liked feeling of accumulating knowledge in his brain. It was something he had enjoyed ever since he was a child.
Haruki Murakami
#39. 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
#40. Actually getting closer to a metaphorical truth? Or metaphorically getting closer to an actual truth?
Haruki Murakami
#41. She was yours to begin with. Now, maybe, she's where she belongs.
Haruki Murakami
#42. 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
#43. I was dying. Like all the other people who live in this world.
Haruki Murakami
#44. We worked so hard, so hard, building our world one brick at a time. And when it fell apart, it happened just like that. Everything was gone before you knew it.
Haruki Murakami
#45. It's as if loosening that knot I'd never noticed before had slackened my interest along with it. At the same time that I'd lost something, something new had also taken root deep within me.
Haruki Murakami
#47. When a vacuum forms, something has to come along to fill it
Haruki Murakami
#48. Potentiality knocks on the door of my heart. [On Seeing The 100% Perfect Girl One Beautiful April Morning ]
Haruki Murakami
#49. This was always the problem when talking to Fuka-Eri. All roads inevitably gave out.
Haruki Murakami
#51. People with dark souls have nothing but dark dreams. People with really dark souls do nothing but dream.
Haruki Murakami
#52. Music always stimulates my imagination. When I'm writing I usually have some Baroque music on low in the background chamber music by Bach, Telemann, and the like.
Haruki Murakami
#53. I cry when I'm lonely. Reiko says it's good I can cry. But feeling lonely really hurts.
Haruki Murakami
#54. 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
#55. It was Aomame's firm belief that the human body was a temple, to be kept as strong and beautiful and clean as possible, whatever one might enshrine there.
Haruki Murakami
#56. 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
#57. There weren't any curtains in the windows, and the books that didn't fit into the bookshelf lay piled on the floor like a bunch of intellectual refugees.
Haruki Murakami
#58. In terms of evolutionary history, it was only yesterday that men learned to walk around on two legs and get in trouble thinking complicated thoughts. So don't worry, you'll burn out.
Haruki Murakami
#59. I'm kind of a big kettle. It takes time to get boiled, but then I'm always hot.
Haruki Murakami
#60. I'm not going to lay off or quit just because I'm busy. If I used being busy as an excuse not to run, I'd never run again. I have only a few reasons to keep on running, and a truckload of them to quit.
Haruki Murakami
#61. There is no need for me to close my eyes, of course, down here in the darkness, but I do it anyway. Closing the eyes has its own significance, in darkness or otherwise.
Haruki Murakami
#62. 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
#63. He had probably never thought about the difference between hard work and manual labour, either.
Haruki Murakami
#64. Once you do learn about the truth, you end up having to take a certain responsibility for it.
Haruki Murakami
#65. Somehow the world survived the Nazis, the atomic bomb, and modern music
Haruki Murakami
#66. This layers, like some kind of transparent sponge kind of thing, stands there between Eri Asai and me, and the words that come out of my mouth have to pass through it, and when that happens, the sponge sucks almost all the nutrients right out of them.
Haruki Murakami
#67. She didn't answer. Instead, she smiled sweetly. It was a smile so radiant that the air seemed to thin around it.
Haruki Murakami
#68. In the instant Miu touched her hair, Sumire fell in love, like she was crossing a field and bang! a bolt of lightning zapped her right in the head. Something akin to an artistic revelation.
Haruki Murakami
#69. The clouds looked like silent travelers headed for the edge of the earth.
Haruki Murakami
#70. Those were strange days, now that I look back at them. In the midst of life, everything revolved around death.
Haruki Murakami
#71. When I see a dictionary on my desk I feel like I'm looking at some strange dog leaving a twisty piece of poop on our lawn out back.
Haruki Murakami
#72. But I didn't walk a single step. I stopped a lot to stretch, but I never walked. I didn't come here to walk. I came to run. That's the reason-the only reason-I flew all the way to the northern tip of Japan. No matter how slow I might run, I wasn't about to walk. That was the rule.
Haruki Murakami
#73. Every writer has his writing technique - what he can and can't do to describe something like war or history. I'm not good at writing about those things, but I try because I feel it is necessary to write that kind of thing.
Haruki Murakami
#74. But decent motives don't always produce decent results. And the body is not the only target of rape. Violence does not always take visible form, and not all wounds gush blood." ~the dowager
Haruki Murakami
#75. 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
#76. Whether you take a doughnut hole as blank space or as an entity unto itself is a purely metaphysical question and does not affect the taste of the doughnut one bit. Sitting
Haruki Murakami
#77. All I wanted was to put myself to sleep in towns I didn't know.
Haruki Murakami
#78. Most people are not looking for provable truths. As you said, truth is often accompanied by intense pain, and almost no one is looking for painful truths. What people need is beautiful, comforting stories that make them feel as if their lives have some meaning. Which is where religion comes from.
Haruki Murakami
#79. It's a thrill to look at the clear night sky and discover a new star before anybody else sees it.
Haruki Murakami
#80. 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
#81. I've chosen to live - and to live the best I know how.
Haruki Murakami
#82. Robbing people of their actual history is the same as robbing them of a part of themselves. It's a crime.
Haruki Murakami
#83. I watched her long, straight hair swaying right and left where it met her shoulders.
Haruki Murakami
#84. My father belongs to the generation that fought the war in the 1940s. When I was a kid my father told me stories - not so many, but it meant a lot to me. I wanted to know what happened then, to my father's generation. It's a kind of inheritance, the memory of it.
Haruki Murakami
#85. We survived. You and I. And those who survive have a duty. Our duty is to do our best to keep on living. Even if our lives are not perfect.
Haruki Murakami
#86. And every night I thought of you. Now that I can no longer see you, I realise how much I need you. Everything seems pointless since you left.
Haruki Murakami
#87. 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
#88. Are you really going to go all the way to Helsinki to see her without getting in touch first? All the way across the Arctic Circle?" "Is that too weird?" She laughed. " 'Bold' is the word I'd use for it." "I feel like things will work out better that way. Just intuition, of course.
Haruki Murakami
#89. For some reason all the middle-aged women he knew were very efficient.
Haruki Murakami
#90. Strangely transparent, they seemed like windows to a world beyond, but however long I peered into there depths, there was nothing I could see.
Haruki Murakami
#91. I forget my name," the cat said. "I had one, I know I did, but somewhere along the line I didn't need it anymore. So it's slipped my mind.
Haruki Murakami
#94. 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
#95. I knew for a certain that if I had to do it all over again, I would live this day in exactly the same way.
Haruki Murakami
#96. Body language generally fails to have its intended effect on the phone.
Haruki Murakami
#98. Special emotions that arise only in a dark corner unknown to other people, where the real and the unreal secretly mingle.
Haruki Murakami
#99. That sounds good. But I don't like to be tied down in one place. I want to be free-to go to where I want, when I want, and be able to think about whatever I want.
Haruki Murakami
#100. 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
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