Haruki Murakami Quotes (242 Quotes)

But knowing what I don't want to do doesn't help me figure out what I do want to do. I could do just about anything if somebody made me. But I don't have an image of the one thing I really want to do. That's my problem now. I can't find the image.

It suddenly occurred to me that true believers in hard-driving jazz-Albert Ayler, Don Cherry, Cecil Taylor-could never become owners of cleaning shops in malls across from railroad stations.

Spend your money on the things money can buy. Spend your time on the things money can't buy.

When you are used to the kind of life -of never getting anything you want- you stop knowing what it is you want.

And as the years have passed, the time has grown longer. The sad truth is that what I could recall in five seconds all too needed ten, then thirty, then a full minute - like shadows lengthening at dusk. Someday, I suppose, the shadows will be swallowed up in darkness.

I was always hungry for love. Just once, I wanted to know what it was like to get my fill of it -- to be fed so much love I couldn't take any more. Just once.

Nobody likes being alone that much. I don't go out of my way to make friends, that's all. It just leads to disappointment.

What a terrible thing it is to wound someone you really care for and to do it so unconsciously.

Everybody burns out in this world; amateur, pro, it doesn't matter, they all burn out, they all get hurt, the OK guys and the not-OK guys both. That's why everybody takes out a little insurance. I've got some too, here at the bottom of the heap. That way, you manage to survive if you burn out. If you're all by yourself and don't belong anywhere, you go down once, and you're out. Finished.

It was a narrow world, a world that was standing still. But the narrower it became, the more it betook of stillness, the more this world that enveloped me seemed to overflow with things and people that could only be called strange. They had been there all the while, it seemed, waiting in the shadows for me to stop moving. And every time the wind-up bird came to my yard to wind its spring, the world descendedmore deeply into chaos.

Strange as it may seem-or perhaps it does not seem so strange-they all had the same thought: it was so much easier to kill humans on the battlefield than animals in cages, even if, on the battlefield, one might end up being killed oneself.

You are entering a phase of your life in which many different things will occur...bad things that seem good at first and good things that seem bad at first.

Death is not the opposite of life but an innate part of life.

I was thirty-seven then, strapped in my seat as the huge 747 plunged through dense cloud cover on approach to the Hamburg airport.

Not that we were incompatible: we just had nothing to talk about.

What the hell kind of revolution have you got just tossing out big words that working-class people can't understand?

Hatred is like a long, dark shadow. Not even the person it falls upon knows where it comes from, in most cases. It is like a two-edged sword. When you cut the other person, you cut yourself. The more violently you hack at the other person, the more violently you hack at yourself. It can often be fatal. But it is not easy to dispose of. Please be careful, Mr.Okada. It is very dangerous. Once it has taken root in your heart, hatred is the most difficult think in the world to shake off.

It was not one of those strong, impulsive feelings that can hit two people like an electric shock when they first meet, but something quieter and gentler, like two tiny lights traveling in tandem through a vast darkness and drawing imperceptibly closer to each other as they go.

Thanks to the long days of rain, the blades of grass glowed with a deep-green luster, and they gave off the smell of wildness unique to things that sink their roots into the earth.

Death was not the opposite of life. It was already here, within my being, it had always been here, and no struggle would permit me to forget that.

I wonder what ants do on rainy days?

Only the dead stay 17 forever.

When you fall in love, the natural thing to do is give yourself to it.

Have you ever had that feeling-that you'd like to go to a whole different place and become a whole different self?

Kumiko and I felt something for each other from the beginning. It was not one of those strong, impulsive feelings that can hit two people like an electric shock when they first meet, but something quieter and gentler, like two tiny lights traveling in tandem through a vast darkness and drawing imperceptibly closer to each other as they go. As our meetings grew more frequent, I felt not so much that I had met someone new as that I had chanced upon a dear old friend.

The darkness behind my closed eyelids was like the cloud-covered sky, but the gray was somewhat deeper. Every few minutes, someone would come and paint over the gray with a different-textured gray - one with a touch of gold or green or red. I was impressed with the variety of grays that existed. Human beings were so strange. All you had to do was sit still for ten minutes, and you could see this amazing variety of grays.

Had I done the right thing by not telling her? Maybe not. Who on earth wanted the right thing anyway? Yet what meaning could there be if nothing was right? If nothing was fair? Fairness is a concept that holds only in limited situations. Yet we want the concept to extend to everything, in and out of phase.

Time is too conceptual. Not that it stops us from filling it in. So much so, we can't even tell whether our experiences belong to time or to the world of physical things.

As long as there's such a thing as time, everybody's damaged in the end, changed into something else. It always happens, sooner or later.

Happiness is an allegory, unhappiness a story

I'm not a fast reader. I like to linger over each sentence, enjoying the style. If I don't enjoy the writing, I stop.

Reality's just the accumulation of ominous prophecies come to life. All you have to do is open a newspaper on any given day to weigh the good news versus the bad news, and you'll see what I mean.

Huge organizations and me don't get along. They're too inflexible, waste too much time, and have too many stupid people.

To think that each skull once had skin and flesh and was stuffed with gray matter-in varying quantities-teeming with thoughts of food and sex and dominance. All now vanished.

As long as you have the courage to admit mistakes, things can be turned around.

Having an object that symbolizes freedom might make a person happier than actually getting the freedom it represents.

In dreams begins responsiblities.

Silence, I discover, is something you can actually hear.

I never trust people with no appetite. It's like they're always holding something back on you.

Unclose your mind. You are not a prisoner. You are a bird in fight, searching the skies for dreams.

Becoming a different person might be hard, but taking on a different name is a cinch.

Her smile steps offstage for a moment, then does an encore, all while I'm dealing with my blushing face.

In traveling, a companion, in life, compassion.

Symbolism and meaning are two separate things. I think she found the right words by bypassing procedures like meaning and logic. She captured words in a dream, like delicately catching hold of a butterfly's wings as it flutters around. Artists are those who can evade the verbose.

I thought about the screws and their happiness. Maybe they were glad to be free of the eggbeater, to be independent screws, to luxuriate on white trays. It did feel good to see them happy.

Were the stars out when I left the house last evening? All I could remember was the couple in the Skyline listening to Duran Duran. Stars? Who remembers stars? Come to think of it, had I even looked up at the sky recently? Had the stars been wiped out of the sky three months ago, I wouldn't have known.

Beethoven, he learned, was a proud man who believed absolutely in his own abilities and never bothered to flatter the nobility. Believing that art itself, and the proper expression of emotions, was the most SUBLIME thing in the world, he thought political power and wealth only served one purpose: to make art possible.

I don't know what it means to live.

It feels like everything's been decided in advance that I'm following a path somebody else has already mapped out for me. It doesn't matter how much I think things over, how much effort I put into it. In fact, the harder I try, the more I lose my sense of who I am. It's like my identity's an orbit that I've strayed far away from, and that really hurts. But more than that, it scares me. Just thinking about it makes me flinch.

Taking crazy things seriously is a serious waste of time.