Haruki Murakami Quotes (242 Quotes)

What do you think? I'm not a starfish or a pepper tree. I'm a living, breathing human being. Of course I've been in love.

Hey Kizuki, I thought, you're not missing a damn thing. This world is a piece of shit. The assholes are earning their college credits and helping to create a society in their own disgusting image.

In his own way, he's lived life with all the intensity he could muster.

That's the kind of death that frightens me. The shadow of death slowly, slowly eats away at the region of life, and before you know it everything's dark and you can't see, and the people around you think of you as more dead than alive.

A girl doesn't always want to go out, you know, Mr. Wind-Up Bird. Sometimes she feels like being nasty--like, if the guy's gonna wait, let him really wait.

I tell you, Mr. Okada, a cold beer at the end of the day is the best thing life has to offer. Some choosy people say that a too cold beer doesn't taste good, but I couldn't disagree more. The first beer should be so cold you can't even taste it. The second one should be a little less chilled, but I want that first one to be like ice. I want it to be so cold my temples throb with pain. This is my own personal preference of course.

Noboru Wataya is a person who belongs to a world that is the exact opposite of yours... In a world where you are losing everything, Mr.Okada, Noboru Wataya is gaining everything. In a world where you are rejected, he is accepted. And the opposite is just as true. Which is why he hates you so intensely.

There's a special feeling you get on a veranda that you just can't get anywhere else.

When I open them, most of the books have the smell of an earlier time leaking out between the pages - a special odor of the knowledge and emotions that for ages have been calmly resting between the covers. Breathing it in, I glance through a few pages before returning each book to its shelf.

I can never say what I want to say, it's been like this for a while now. I try to say something but all I get are wrong words - the wrong words or the exact opposite words from what I mean. I try to correct myself, and that only makes it worse. I lose track of what I was trying to say to begin with. It's like I'm split in two and playing tag with myself. One half is chasing this big, fat post. The other me has the right words, but this can't catch her.

It was a small room with dim light coming in the window, reminiscent of old Polish films.

The dead will always be dead, but we have to go on living.

A life without pain: it was the very thing I had dreamed of for years, but now that I had it, I couldn't find a place for myself within it. A clear gap separated me from it, and this caused me great confusion. I felt as if I were not anchored to this world - this world that I had hated so passionately until then; this world that I had continued to revile for its unfairness and injustice; this world where at least I knew who I was. Now the world ceased to be the world, and I had ceased to be me.

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.

Nothing so consumes a person as meaningless exertion

This person, this self, this me, finally, was made somewhere else. Everything had come from somewhere else, and it would all go somewhere else. I was nothing but a pathway for the person known as me.

When I wake up, my pillow's cold and damp with tears. But tears for what? I have no idea.

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.

It was as if I were writing letters to hold together the pieces of my crumbling life.

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.

A person's destiny is something you look back at afterwards, not something to be known in advance.

I was dying. Like all the other people who live in this world.

Once a guy starts using a wig, he has to keep using one. It's, like, his fate. That's why wig makers make such huge profits. I hate to say it, but they're like drug dealers.

To know one's own state is not a simple matter. One cannot look directly at one's own face with one's own eyes, for example. One has no choice but to look at one's reflection in the mirror. Through experience, we come to believe that the image is correct, but that is all.

When someone is trying very hard to get something, they don't. And when they're running away from something as hard as they can, it usually catches up with them.

I don't go out of my way to make friends, that's all.

It's basically impossible for everybody's justice to prevail or everybody's happiness to triumph, so chaos takes over.

The world is an inherently unfair place.

A regular wind-up toy world this is, I think. Once a day the wind-up bird has to come and wind the springs of this world. Alone in this fun house, only I grow old, a pale softball of death swelling inside me. Yet even as I sleep somewhere between Saturn and Uranus, wind-up birds everywhere are busy at work fulfilling their appointed rounds.

I'd be smiling and chatting away, and my mind would be floating around somewhere else, like a balloon with a broken string.

One last word of advice, though, Mr. Okada, though you may not want to hear this. There are things in this world it is better not to know about. Of course, those are the very things that people most want to know about. It's strange.

To tell you the truth, sleepless nights are as unusual for me as sumo wrestlers who look good in berets.

You are a major dimwit. Is your brain made out of jello, you spineless twit? A leaf? What do you think I am, one of those magical raccoons? I'm a concept, get it? Con-cept! Concepts and raccoons aren't exactly the same, now are they? What a dumb thing to say...

I don't want our relationship to end like this. You're one of the very few friends I have, and it hurts not being able to see you. When am I going to be able to talk to you? I want you to tell me that much, at least.

It's good when food tastes good, it's kind of like proof you're alive.

The years nineteen and twenty are a crucial stage in the maturation of character, and if you allow yourself to become warped when you're that age, it will cause you pain when you're older.

A Russian who uses his imagination is done for. I certainly never use mine.

If something came out of the deal, it couldn't make things any worse for us than they already were, I thought. But I couldn't have been more wrong. Hell has no true bottom.

Or maybe the ... shock of it started me covering up all kinds of memories the way a squirrel hides a nut and forgets where he's buried it.

We were young, and we had no need for prophecies. Just living was itself an act of prophecy.

You can't look too far ahead. Do that and you'll lose sight of what you're doing and stumble. I'm not saying you should focus solely on the details right in front of you, mind you. You've got to look ahead a bit or else you'll bump into something. You've got to conform to the proper order and at the same time keep an eye out for what's ahead. That's critical, no matter what you're doing.

I found a Bill Evans record in the bookcase and was listening to it while drying my hair when I realized that it was the record I had played in Naoko's room on the night of her birthday, the night she cried and I took her in my arms. That had happened only six months earlier, but it felt like something from a much remoter past. Maybe it felt that way because I had thought about it so often-too often, to the point where it had distorted my sense of time.

Just as you take care of the birds and the fields every morning, every morning I wind my own spring. I give it some thirty-six good twists by the time I've gotten up, brushed my teeth, shaved, eaten breakfast, changed my clothes, left the dorm, and arrived at the university. I tell myself, Ok, let's make this day another good one.

Things like that happen all the time in this great big world of ours. It is like taking a boat out on a beautiful lake on a beautiful day and thinking both the sky and the lake are beautiful. Things will go where they are supposed to go if you just let them take their natural course. Despite your best efforts, people are going to be hurt when it is time for them to be hurt. Life is like that.

All right, then, I thought: here I am in the bottom of a well.

I'm going to take you out of here ... I'm going to take you home, to the world where you belong, where cats with bent tails live, and there are little backyards, and alarm clocks ring in the morning.

Results aside, the ability to have complete faith in another human being is one of the finest qualities a person can possess

Well, finally, the events I've been through have been tremendously complicated. All kinds of characters have come on the scene, and strange things have happened one after another, to the point where, if I try to think about them in order, I lose track.

Your heart is like a great river after a long spell of rain, spilling over its banks. All signposts that once stood on the ground are gone, inundated and carried away by that rush of water. And still the rain beats down on the surface of the river. Every time you see a flood like that on the news you tell yourself: That's it. That's my heart.

I have a million things to talk to you about. All I want in this world is you. I want to see you and talk. I want the two of us to begin everything from the beginning.