Haruki Murakami: Trending quotes

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Haruki Murakami: 1310 quotes136 likes

“Force yourself to explain it and you create lies.”

Haruki Murakami book Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage

Source: Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage

“Time passes slowly. Nobody says a word, everyone lost in quiet reading. One person sits at a desk jotting down notes, but the rest are sitting there silently, not moving, totally absorbed. Just like me.”

Haruki Murakami book Kafka on the Shore

Source: Kafka on the Shore

“Isn't life strange? There are people who have so many leftover clothes they can't stuff them all in their wardrobe. And then there are people like me, whose socks never match.”

Haruki Murakami book Sputnik Sweetheart

Source: Sputnik Sweetheart

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

Haruki Murakami book The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

Source: The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

“In dreams lie responsibilities.”

Haruki Murakami book Kafka on the Shore

Variant: In dreams begins responsiblities.
Source: Kafka on the Shore

“A secret's a secret because you don't let people in on it.”

Haruki Murakami book Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World

Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World

“…. solitude is, more or less, an inevitable consequence.”

Haruki Murakami book What I Talk About When I Talk About Running

What I Talk About When I Talk About Running

“My cell phone number," she says with a wry expression. "I'm staying at my friend's place for a while buy if you ever feel like sseeing somebody, give me a call. We can go out for a bite or whatever. Don't be a stranger, okay? 'Even chance meetings'… how does the rest of that go?”

Haruki Murakami book Kafka on the Shore

"'Are the results of karma.'"
Kafka on the Shore (2002)

“The house kept its own time, like the old-fashioned grandfather clock in the living room. People who happened by raised the weights, and as long as the weights were wound, the clock continued ticking away. But with people gone and the weights unattended, whole chunks of time were left to collect in deposits of faded life on the floor.”

Haruki Murakami

Source: A Wild Sheep Chase: A Novel (1982), Chapter 32, An Unlucky Bend in the Road

“On my fifteenth birthday I'll run away from home, journey to a far-off town, and live in a corner of a small library. It'd take a week to go into the whole thing, all the details. So I'll just give the main point. On my fifteenth birthday I'll run away from home, journey to a far-off town, and live in a corner of a small library.”

Haruki Murakami book Kafka on the Shore

Source: Kafka on the Shore (2002), Chapter One

“The negation of cognition thus correlates on the verbal level. For when those two pillars of Western humanism, individual cognition and evolutionary continuity, lose their meaning, language loses meaning. Existence ceases for the individuum as we know it, and all becomes chaos. You cease to be a unique entity unto yourself, but exist simply as chaos. And not just the chaos that is you; you chaos is also my chaos. To wit, existence is communication, and communication, existence.”

Haruki Murakami

Source: A Wild Sheep Chase: A Novel (1982), Chapter 18, The Strange Man's Tale Goes on

“Closing your eyes isn't going to change anything. Nothing's going to disappear just because you can't see what's going on. In fact, things will even be worse the next time you open your eyes. That's the kind of world we live in. Keep your eyes wide open. Only a coward closes his eyes. Closing your eyes and plugging up your ears won't make time stand still.”

Haruki Murakami book Kafka on the Shore

Kafka on the Shore (2002)

“The term "spirit projection " sprang to mind. Are you familiar with it? Japanese folk tales are full of this sort of thing, where the soul temporarily leaves the body and goes off a great distance to take care of some vital task and then returns to reunite with the body. The sort of vengeful spirits that populate The Tale of Genji may be something similar. The notion of the soul not just leaving the body at death but-assuming the will is strong enough -also being able to separate from the body of the living is probably an idea that took root in Japan in ancient times. Of course there's no scientific proof of this, and I hesitate to even raise the idea.”

Haruki Murakami book Kafka on the Shore

Source: Kafka on the Shore (2002), Chapter Eight,

“According to Aristophanes in Plato's The Banquet, in the ancient world of legend there were three types of people.
In ancient times people weren't simply male or female, but one of three types: male/male, male/female or female/female. In other words, each person was made out of the components of two people. Everyone was happy with this arrangement and never really gave it much thought. But then God took a knife and cut everyone in half, right down the middle. So after that the world was divided just into male and female, the upshot being that people spend their time running around trying to locate their missing half.”

Haruki Murakami book Kafka on the Shore

Source: Kafka on the Shore (2002), Chapter Five, Oshima

“You burn barns. I don't burn barns. There's this glaring difference, and to me, rather than say which of us is strange, first of all I'd like to clear up just what that difference is.”

Haruki Murakami book Barn Burning

Barn Burning (short story) in The Elephant Vanishes

“In the depths of our crater lake, everything is silent. The volcano's been extinct for ages. Layer upon layer of solitude, like folds of soft mud. The little bit of light that manages to penetrate to the depths lights up the surroundings like the remains of some faint, distant memory. At these depths there's no sign of life. I don't know how long she looks at me -not at me, maybe, but at the spot where I am. Time's rules don't apply here. Time expands, then contracts, all in tune with the stirrings of the heart.”

Haruki Murakami book Kafka on the Shore

Source: Kafka on the Shore (2002), Chapter 23, Kafka Temura

“Weakness is something that rots in the body. Like gangrene. I’ve felt that ever since I was a teenager. That’s why I was always on edge. There’s this something inside you that’s rotting away and you feel it all along.”

Haruki Murakami

Source: A Wild Sheep Chase: A Novel (1982), Chapter 40, The Rat Who Wound the Clock

“I've experienced all kinds of discrimination," Oshima says. "Only people who've been discriminated against can really know how much it hurts. Each person feels the pain in his own way, each has his own scars. So I think I'm as concerned about fairness and justice as anybody. But what disgusts me even more are people who have no imagination. The kind T. S. Eliot calls hollow men. People who fill up that lack of imagination with heartless bits of straw, not even aware of what they're doing. Callous people who throw a lot of empty words at you, trying to force you to do what you don't want to. Like that lovely pair we just met." He sighs and twirls the long slender pencil in his hand. "Gays, lesbians, straights, feminists, fascist pigs, communists, Hare Krishnas-none of them bother me. I don't care what banner they raise. But what I can't stand are hollow people. When I'm with them I just can't bear it, and wind up saying things I shouldn't. With those women I should've just let it slide, or else called Miss Saeki and let her handle it. She would have given them a smile and smoothed things over. But I just can't do that. I say things I shouldn't, do things I shouldn't do. I can't control myself. That's one of my weak points.”

Haruki Murakami book Kafka on the Shore

Source: Kafka on the Shore (2002), Chapter 19, Oshima

“To sleep with a woman: it can seem of the utmost importance in your mind, or then again it can seem like nothing much at all. Which only goes to say that there's sex as therapy (self-therapy, that is) and there's sex as pastime. There's sex for self-improvement start to finish and there's sex for killing time straight through; sex that is therapeutic at first only to end up as nothing-better-to-do, and vice versa. Our human sex life- how shall I put it?- differs fundamentally from the sex life of a whale. We are not whales- and this constitutes one great theme underscoring our sex lives.”

Haruki Murakami

Source: A Wild Sheep Chase: A Novel (1982), Chapter 4: The Whale's Penis and the Woman with Three Occupations