Haruki Murakami: Trending quotes

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Haruki Murakami: 1310 quotes136 likes

“I think what Kafka does is give a purely mechanical explanation of that complex machine in the story, as sort of a substitute for explaining the situation we're in. What I mean is … " I have to give it some more thought. "What I mean is, that's his own device for explaining the kind of lives we lead. Not by talking about our situation, but by talking about the details of the machine.”

Haruki Murakami book Kafka on the Shore

Source: Kafka on the Shore (2002), Chapter Seven, Kafka Tamura

“""likewesaid, we'lldowhatwecan. Trytoreconnectyou, towhatyouwant,"" said the Sheep Man. ""Butwecan'tdoit-alone. Yougottaworktoo.
Sittingsnotgonnadoit, thinking'snotgonnadoit."" ""So what do I have to do?"" ""Dance,"" said the Sheep Man. ""Yougottadance. Aslongasthemusicplays. Yougotta dance. Don'teventhinkwhy. Starttothink, yourfeetstop. Yourfeetstop, wegetstuck. Wegetstuck, you'restuck. Sodon'tpayanymind, nomatterhowdumb. Yougottakeepthestep. Yougottalimberup. Yougottaloosenwhatyoubolteddown. Yougottauseallyougot. Weknowyou're tired, tiredandscared. Happenstoeveryone, ok? Justdon'tletyourfeetstop.""”

Haruki Murakami book Dance Dance Dance

Dance Dance Dance

“I stare at this ceaseless, rushing crowd and imagine a time a hundred years from now. In a hundred years everybody here - me included - will have disappeared from the face of the earth and turned into ashes or dust. A weird thought, but everything in front of me starts to seem unreal, like a gust of wind could blow it all away”

Haruki Murakami book Kafka on the Shore

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

“If your confusion leads you in the right direction, the results can be uncommonly rewarding.”

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

Source: Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World (1985), Chapter One

“The world is mediocre. About that there is no mistake. Well then, has the world been mediocre since time immemorial? No. In the beginning, the world was chaos, and chaos is not mediocre. The mediocratization began when people separated the means of production from daily life.”

Haruki Murakami

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

“Adults constantly raise the bar on smart children, precisely because they're able to handle it. The children get overwhelmed by the tasks in front of them and gradually lose the sort of openness and sense of accomplishment they innately have. When they're treated like that, children start to crawl inside a shell and keep everything inside. It takes a lot of time and effort to get them to open up again. Kid's hearts are malleable, but once they gel it's hard to get them back the way they were. Next to impossible, in most cases.”

Haruki Murakami book Kafka on the Shore

Source: Kafka on the Shore (2002), Chapter 12

“And it came to me then. That we were wonderful traveling companions but in the end no more than lonely lumps of metal in their own separate orbits. From far off they look like beautiful shooting stars, but in reality they're nothing more than prisons, where each of us is locked up alone, going nowhere. When the orbits of these two satellites of ours happened to cross paths, we could be together. Maybe even open our hearts to each other. But that was only for the briefest moment. In the next instant we'd be in absolute solitude. Until we burned up and became nothing.”

Haruki Murakami book Sputnik Sweetheart

Sputnik Sweetheart

“There's nothing worse than waking up in total darkness. It's like having to go back and live life all over from the beginning. When I first opened my eyes, iy esd sd ig I ertr living someone' else's life. After an extremely long time, this began to match up with my own life. A curious overslap this, my own life as some else's. It was improbabblr that such a person as myself could even be living.”

Haruki Murakami

Source: A Wild Sheep Chase: A Novel (1982), Chapter 38, And So Time Passes

“You are not lost. It's just that your own thoughts are being kept from you, or hidden away. But the mind is strong. It survives even without thought. Even with everything taken away, it holds a seed-your self. You must believe in your powers.”

Haruki Murakami

Source: Hardboiled Wonderland and the End of the World (1985), Chapter 24: Shadow Grounds

“When a war starts people are forced to become soldiers. They carry guns and go to the front lines and have to kill soldiers on the other side. As many as they possibly can. Nobody cares whether you like killing other people or not. It's just something you have to do. Otherwise you're the one who gets killed." Johnnie Walker pointed his index finger at Nakata's chest. "Bang!"”

Haruki Murakami book Kafka on the Shore

he said. "Human history in a nutshell."
Source: Kafka on the Shore (2002), Chapter 16

“So it was that my most impressionable years of boyhood were spent gazing at not a whale, but a whale's penis. Whenever I tired of strolling through the chill aisles of the aquarium, I'd steal off to my place on the bench of the high-ceilinged stillness of the exhibition room and spend hours on end there contemplating this whale's penis.”

Haruki Murakami

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

“Nakata let his body relax, switched off his mind, allowing things to flow through him. This was natural for him, something he'd done ever since he was a child, without a second thought. Before long the borders of his consciousness fluttered around, just like the butterflies. Beyond these borders lay a dark abyss. Occasionally his consciousness would fly over the border and hover over that dizzying, black crevass. But Nakata wasn't afraid of the darkness or how deep it was. And why should he be? That bottomless world of darkness, that weighty silence and chaos, was an old friend, a part of him already. Nakata understood this well. In that world there was no writing, no days of the week, no scary Governor, no opera, no BMWs. No scissors, no tall hats. On the other hand, there was also no delicious eel, no tasty bean-jam buns. Everything is there, but there are no parts. Since there are no parts, there's no need to replace one thing with another. No need to remove anything, or add anything. You don't have to think about difficult things, just let yourself soak it all in. For Nakata, nothing could be better.”

Haruki Murakami book Kafka on the Shore

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

“The elevator continued its impossibly slow ascent. Or at least I imagined it was ascent. There was no telling for sure: it was so slow that all sense of direction simply vanished. It could have been going down for all I knew, or maybe it wasn’t moving at all. But let’s just assume it was going up. Merely a guess. Maybe I’d gong up twelve stories, then down three. Maybe I’d circled the globe. How would I know?”

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

Opening paragraph, Chapter One
Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World (1985)

“I was twenty-one at the time, about to turn twenty-two. No prospect of graduating soon, and yet no reason to quit school. Caught in the most curiously depressing circumstances. For months I'd been stuck, unable to take one step in any new direction. The world kept moving on; I alone was at a standstill. In the autumn, everything took on a desolate cast, the colors swiftly fading before my eyes. The sunlight, the smell of the grass, the faintest patter of rain, everything got on my nerves.”

Haruki Murakami

Source: A Wild Sheep Chase: A Novel (1982), Chapter 1: Wednesday Afternoon Picnic

“You still don't get it, do you? We're talking about a revelation here," Colonel Sanders said, clicking his tongue. "A revelation leaps over the borders of the everyday. A life without revelation is no life at all. What you need to do is move from reason that observes to reason that acts. That's what's critical. Do you have any idea what I'm talking about, you gold-plated whale of a dunce?”

Haruki Murakami book Kafka on the Shore

Source: Kafka on the Shore (2002), Chapter 28, Colonel Sanders

“My biggest fault is that the faults I was born with grow bigger each year. It's like I was raising chickens inside of me. The chickens lay their eggs and the eggs hatch into other chickens, which then lay eggs.”

Haruki Murakami

Source: A Wild Sheep Chase: A Novel (1982), Chapter 13, The Rat's First Letter

“He inherited from his mother's stories the fundamental style he used, unaltered, in his own stories: namely, the assumption that fact may not be truth, and truth may not be factual.”

Haruki Murakami book The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (1994-1995)

“The world of the grotesque is the darkness within us. Well before Freud and Jung shined a light on the workings of the subconscious, this correlation between darkness and our subconscious, these two forms of darkness, was obvious to people. It wasn't a metaphor, even. If you trace it back further, it wasn't even a correlation. Until Edison invented the electric light, most of the world was totally covered in darkness. The physical darkness outside and the inner darkness of the soul were mixed together, with no boundary separating the two. They were directly linked. Like this.”

Haruki Murakami book Kafka on the Shore

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

“Works that have a certain imperfection to them have an appeal for that you're attracted to Soseki's The Miner. There's something in it that draws you in, more than more fully realized novels like Kokoro or Sanshiro. You discover something about that work that tugs at your heart-or maybe we should say that work discovers you.”

Haruki Murakami book Kafka on the Shore

Source: Kafka on the Shore (2002), Chapter 13, Schubert

“I said this one day to the doctor in charge of my case, and he told me that, in a sense, what I was feeling was right, that we are in here not to correct the deformation but to accustom ourselves to it: that one of our problems was our inability to recognize and accept our own deformities. Just as each person has certain idiosyncrasies in the way he or she walks, people have idiosyncrasies in the way they think and feel and see things, …”

Haruki Murakami