Top 56 Ryu Murakami Quotes
#1. In heated rooms, he often felt the outlines of his body, the border between him and the external world, grow disturbingly fuzzy.
Ryu Murakami
#2. That soft but penetrating voice that caressed your ears and climbed through your brain like a vine.
Ryu Murakami
#3. I wondered if there were planets where it's okay to murder people. I decided there must be, reminding myself that in war, after all, killers are heroes.
Ryu Murakami
#4. Just before I fell asleep, I had a moment of panic ...
Ryu Murakami
#5. 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.
Ryu Murakami
#6. I wonder why people you have to meet have to be such liars. They lie as if their lives depended on it.
Ryu Murakami
#7. They don't realise that they've changed; they think it's the world that changed.
Ryu Murakami
#8. After hanging up the phone Aoyama sank back back on the sofa feeling like a balloon in a warm blue sky.
Ryu Murakami
#9. The type of loneliness where you need to keep struggling to accept a situation is fundamentally different than the sort you know you'll get through if you just hang in there
Ryu Murakami
#10. Having nothing better to do, meandered off to a coffee shop and sat facing each other for a couple of hours, neither of them talking much but each coming to the general conclusion that the other was a person rather like himself ...
Ryu Murakami
#11. TV sounds are all the same; there's no difference between the sound of the wind in Northern Ireland and the wind on a Polynesian island.
Ryu Murakami
#12. Memories are't like words; they're soft and gooey. Covered with a sticky slime, like a penis after sex, or your vagina when you menstruate, and shaped like tadpoles or tiny watersnakes
Ryu Murakami
#13. When you're a kid, getting lost isn't just an event or a situation, it's like a career move. You get this thrill of anxiety and fear and a feeling that you've done something that can never be undone.
Ryu Murakami
#14. His face was smiling, his eyes glittered in the late autumn moonlight, and he emitted a flickering aura that might have triggered seizures in an impartial but sensitive child, and yet he was strangely depressed.
Ryu Murakami
#15. The world's worst flavor combination was mango and menthol.
Ryu Murakami
#17. She's like smoke:you think you're seeing her clearly enough,but when you reach for her there's nothing there
Ryu Murakami
#18. I remembered reading in a hard-boiled detective novel that if you drink in the same place two nights in a row, the bartender and waiters will remember your face.
Ryu Murakami
#19. Everybody wants to talk about themselves, and everybody wants to hear everybody else's story, so we take turns playing reporter and celebrity.
Ryu Murakami
#20. That's when he hit her, when he saw how scared she was. He couldn't bear it that she was frightened and asking for help. Asking for help is wrong. Because there isn't any such thing as help in this world.
Ryu Murakami
#21. 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.
Ryu Murakami
#22. Oba-sans, to put it in somewhat difficult terms, are life-forms that have stopped evolving. And anyone can turn into an Oba-san. Young women, of course, but even young men, even middle-aged men - even children. You turn into an Oba-san the instant you lose the will to evolve.
Ryu Murakami
#23. He invited me to his apartment in the wee hours one morning and pulled out a set of children's building blocks. It seems he used to ride around and around on the Yamanote Line with them, building castles on the floor of the train.
Ryu Murakami
#24. And sometimes ignorance is even harder to deal with than deliberate evil.
Ryu Murakami
#25. What makes somebody nice or unpleasant to be around is the way they communicate. When people are fucked up, their communication is fucked up.
Ryu Murakami
#26. It was a face that instantly robbed those who gazed upon it of a good thirty percent
of the energy they needed to go on living.
Ryu Murakami
#27. Sometimes you can remember everything about an old friend, down to minor details about his behaviour, but for the life of you you can't picture his face.
Ryu Murakami
#28. If everyone could feel as I felt at that moment, dressed in my preppy sweater and McGregor coat and about to set out on a little journey with my Bambi-eyed girlfriend on Christmas Eve, all conflicts in the world would vanish. Mellow smiles would rule the earth.
Ryu Murakami
#29. We sat side by side on the swings. The creaking sound they made seemed sexier to me than a Jimi Hendrix guitar solo.
Ryu Murakami
#30. 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.
Ryu Murakami
#31. Children would struggle desperately to feel love for their parents. Rather than hate a parent, in fact, they'd choose to hate themselves. Love and violence became so intertwined for them that when they grew up and got into relationships, only hysteria could set their hearts at ease.
Ryu Murakami
#32. 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.
Ryu Murakami
#33. There in that pool stained with green blood, he had learned two things: one was that all the pain stopped when you stopped fighting death; and the other was that as long as you could still hear your heart beating, you had to keep fighting back.
Ryu Murakami
#34. Most of the advice was along the lines of, "If you persevere in your efforts you will surely succeed," which is bullshit, if you ask me. People who turn to stuff like this have probably already persevered and gotten nowhere.
Ryu Murakami
#36. And just because I've written this book, don't think I've changed. I'm like I was back then, really.
Ryu Murakami
#37. When you're in an extreme situation you tend to avoid facing it by getting caught up in little details. Like a guy who's decided to commit suicide and boards a train only to become obsessed with whether he remembered to lock the door when he left home.
Ryu Murakami
#38. A person without self-confidence is incapable of being independent, and people who are dependent on their partners always create unhappiness. Always.
Ryu Murakami
#39. I'm sure we've all experienced really malevolent feelings once or twice in our lives, the desire to kill somebody,say.but there's always a braking mechanism somewhere along the line that stop us.
Ryu Murakami
#40. 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.
Ryu Murakami
#41. Sinteen-years -old girls are probably the most sensitive and perceptive group of people in this entire country.
Ryu Murakami
#42. Only time can heal wounds as deep as that - a lot of time - and all you can really do is place yourself in its hands and try to consider the passing of each day a victory.
Ryu Murakami
#43. But for all we've lost, hope is in fact one thing we Japanese have regained. The great earthquake and tsunami have robbed us of many lives and resources. But we who were so intoxicated with our own prosperity have once again planted the seed of hope. So I choose to believe.
Ryu Murakami
#44. 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
#45. But what I did sense was an emptiness like a black hole inside of him, and there was no predicting what might emerge from a place like that.
Ryu Murakami
#46. All Americans have something lonely about them. I don't know what the reason might be, except maybe that they're all descended from immigrants.
Ryu Murakami
#47. Yeah. He wants to be a ... what do you call those guys?" "A sommelier?" "Right. Said he wanted to see your collection." "At fifteen he's already decided what he wants to be?" "Lots of guys have." "Is that wise? To limit your options at such a young age?
Ryu Murakami
#48. Advertising departments, as you know, are crawling with people whose frontal lobes are so underdeveloped that if you flatter them a bit they'll swear shit is platinum.
Ryu Murakami
#49. American loneliness is a completely different creature from anything we experience in this country, and it made me glad I was born japanese.
Ryu Murakami
#50. You don't know what cold is until you've experienced the cold you feel when the blood is draining out of your body.
Ryu Murakami
#51. It was the perfect time and place for an inherently timid person like him to express his
inner pervert by peeing in public.
Ryu Murakami
#52. Words themselves aren't that important. Even if somebody says words that shock you, or make you want to kill them, or make you tremble with emotion, the words themselves you tend to forget in time. Words are just tools we use to express or communicate something.
Ryu Murakami
#53. This was a factory, a sorting house. We were no different from dogs and pigs and cows: all of us were allowed to play when we were small, but then, just before reaching maturity, we were sorted and classified. Being a high school student was the first step toward becoming a domestic animal.
Ryu Murakami
#54. Malevolence is born of negative feelings like loneliness and sadness and anger. It comes from an emptiness inside you that feels as if it's been carved out with a knife, an emptiness you're left with when something very important has been taken away from you
Ryu Murakami
#55. Who hasn't wanted to die at one time or another?
Ryu Murakami
#56. I thought if I were beautiful enough, all my dreams would come true. But you don't steady beautiful forever; one day you wake up and it's gone, and then where are you? Dreams are made with blood and sweat and tears.
Ryu Murakami
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