Haruki Murakami Quotes

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655 Quotes on Love, Loneliness, and the Complexities of Human Emotions

“So many dreams, so many disappointments, so many promises. And in the end, they all just vanish.”

“Imagineminus 'Mack the Knife.' That's what my life would be like without you.”

“There had to be something wrong with my life. I should have been born a Yugoslavian shepherd who looked up at the Big Dipper every night.”

“Our responsibility begins with our imagination.”

“I don't give a damn about what people say. They can be reptile food for all I care.”

“But if you knew you might not be able to see it again tomorrow, everything would suddenly become special and precious, wouldn’t it?”

“The tricky thing about mazes is that you don't know if you've chosen the right path until the very end. If it turns out you were wrong, it's usually too late to go back and start again. That's the problem with mazes.”

“When I first met you, I felt a kind of contradiction in you. You’re seeking something, but at the same time, you are running away for all you’re worth.”

“This was never any place I was meant to be. This isn’t a place for me.”

“Everything was too sharp and clear, so that I could never tell where to start- the way a map that shows too much can sometimes be useless.”

“Have books ‘happened’ to you? Unless your answer to that question is ‘yes,’ I’m unsure how to talk to you”

“I go by the gut. I might not appear to have any talent but I've got plenty of gut instinct.”

“From the moment of my birth, I lived with pain at the center of my life. My only purpose in life was to find a way to coexist with intense pain.”

“It's just like Yeats said. In dreams begin responsibilities. Flip this around and you could say that where there's no power to imagine, no responsibility can arise.”

“The faintest gleam of their lost memories glimmered for the briefest moment in their hearts.”

“When I was little, I had this science book. There was a section on 'What would happen to the world if there was no friction?' Answer: 'Everything on earth would fly into space from the centrifugal force of revolution.' That was my mood.”

“Thinking about spaghetti that boils eternally but is never done is a sad, sad thing.”

“What did it mean for a person to be free? she would often ask herself. Even if you managed to escape from one cage, weren't you just in another, larger one?”

“People are drawn deeper into tragedy not by their defects but by their virtues.”

“It’s precisely because of the pain, the we can get the feeling, through this process, of really being alive—or at least a partial sense of it.”

“Don't tell me anymore. You should have your dream, as the old woman told you to. I understand how you feel, but if you put those feelings into words they will turn into lies. (from Thailand)”

“I guess I don't really understand you yet,' I said. 'I'm not all that smart. It takes me a while to understand things. But if I do have time, I will come to understand you -- better than anyone else in the world ever can.”

“You’re optimistic one moment, only to be racked the next by the certainty that it will all fall to pieces. And in the end it does.”

“Many are the women who can take their clothes off seductively, but women who can charm as they dress?”

“I was enveloped in numbness, and absence of feeling so deep the bottom was lost from view.”

“Whenever I get into something, I shut out everything else.”

“But still," Ayumi said, "it seems to me that this world has a serious shortage of both logic and kindness."
"You may be right," Aomame said, "But it's too late to trade it in for another one.”

“The silence is so deep it hurts our ears.”

“I can be hurt, you know. I can get as exhausted as anybody else. I can feel so bad I want to cry, too.”

“I live my life you live yours. If you're clear about what u want then you can live anyway you please. I don't give a damn what people say. They can be reptile food for all I care.”

“It's the real world, full of gaps and inconsistencies and anticlimaxes.”

“Life is like a box of cookies.”

“You're, you see, and nobody else. Youyou, right?”

“She lived frugally, but her meals were the only things on which she deliberately spent her money. She never compromised on the quality of her groceries, and drank only good-quality wines.”

“Everybody thinks I'm this delicate little girl. But you can't tell a book by it's cover.' To which she added a momentary smile.”

“A deserted library in the morning - there's something about it that really gets to me. All possible words and ideas are there, resting peacefully.”

“At least he never walked.”

“Sheep hurt my father, and through my father, sheep have also hurt me.”

“And everywhere, infinite options, infinite possibilities. An infinity, and at the same time, zero. We try to scoop it all up in our hands, and what we get is a handful of zero. That's the city”

“Another person's life is that person's life. You can't take responsibility.”

“I am here, alone, at the end of the world. I reach out and touch nothing.”.”

“Who can really distinguish between the sea and what's reflected in it? Or tell the difference between the falling rain and loneliness?”

“Painful is the stress when one cannot reproduce or convey vividly to others, however hard he tries, what he's experienced so intensely.”

“As long as I was alive, I was something. That was just how it was. But somewhere along the way it all changed. Living turned me into nothing.”

“I think most people live in fiction… That's how you keep your fragile body intact.”

“People with places to go and people with no place to go; people with a purpose and people with no purpose; people trying to hold time back and people trying to urge it forward”

“sometimes I think I've got this hard kernel in my heart, and nothing much can get inside it. I doubt if I can really love anybody.”

“Overhead, the two moons worked together to bathe the world in a strange light.”

“If you listen to the radio for a whole hour there's maybe one decent song. The rest is mass-produced garbage”