Haruki Murakami Quotes

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

“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.”

“An empty shell. Those were the first words that sprang to mind….. Something incredibly important -.. - had disappeared from Miu for good. Leaving behind not life, but its absence”

“Judging the mistakes of strangers is an easy thing to do - and it feels pretty good.”

“Constipation was one of the things she hated most in the world, on par with despicable men who commit domestic violence and narrow-minded religious fundamentalists.”

“It’s because of you when I’m in bed in the morning that I can wind my spring and tell myself I have to live another good day.”

“She curled up and pressed her cheek against his chest. Her ear was right above his heart. She was listening to his thoughts. "I need to know this," Aomame said. "That we're in the same world, seeing the same things.”

“Maybe the only thing I can definitely say about is this: That’s life. Maybe the only thing we can do is accept it, without really knowing what’s going on.”

“I've been clinging to this world like a discarded shell of an insect stuck to a branch, about to be blown off forever by a gust of wind.”

“Her pupils have taken on a lonely hue, like grey clouds reflected in a calm lake.”

“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.”

“What's really important here," I whispered loudly to myself,"is not the big things other people have thought up, but the small things you, yourself have”

“I closed my eyes and tried to sleep. But it was not until much later that I was able to get any real sleep. In a place far away from anyone or anywhere, I drifted off for a moment.”

“No, I don't want your money. The world moves less by money than by what you owe people and what they owe you. I don't like to owe anybody anything, so I keep to myself as much on the lending side as I can.”

“The ones with no imagination are always the quickest to justify themselves.”

“The only opponent you have to beat is yourself, the way you used to be.”

“Now for a good twelve-hour sleep, I told myself. Twelve solid hours. Let birds sing, let people go to work. Somewhere out there, a volcano might blow, Israeli commandos might decimate a Palestinian village. I couldn't stop it. I was going to sleep.”

“The world follows its own course. Each possesses his own thoughts, each treads his own path. So it is with your mother, and so it is with your starling. As it is with everyone. The world follows its own course.”

“The song is over. But the melody lingers on.”

“You have an interesting history. Now people can generally be classified in to two groups: the mediocre realists and the mediocre dreamers. You clearly belong to the letter. Your fate is and will always be the fate of dreamers.”

“Learning another language is like becoming another person.”

“As long as I kept my body moving I could forget about the emptiness inside.”

“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.”

“Still, in the end, we all die just the same.”

“I don’t know, I don’t feel right unless I’ve got the sea and mountains nearby. People are mostly a product of where they were born and raised. How you think and feel’s always linked to the lay of the land, the temperature. The prevailing winds, even.”

“You make do with what you have. As you age you learn even to be happy with what you have.”

“It’s pretty thin, the wall separating healthy confidence and unhealthy Pride.”

“This is what it means to live on. When granted hope, a person uses it as fuel, as a guidepost to life. It is impossible to live without hope.”

“But falling in love is always a pretty crazy thing. It might appear out of the blue and just grab you. Who knows—maybe even tomorrow.”

“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.”

“My point is: in this whole wide world the only person you can depend on is you.”

“The silence grew deeper, so deep that if you listened carefully you might very well catch the sound of the earth revolving on its axis.”

“Things pass us by. Nobody can catch them. That's the way we live our lives.”

“It was a strange feeling, like touching a void.”

“I'm the kind of person who has to totally commit to whatever I do.”

“I never could stand being forced to do something I didn't want to do at a time I didn't want to do it. Whenever I was able to do something I liked to do, though, when I wanted to do it, and the way I wanted to do it, I'd give it everything I had.”

“This is the extent of his knowledge of the sea: it was very big, it was salty, and fish lived there.”

“You have to make an effort to always look at the good side, always think about the good things. Then you've got nothing to be afraid of. If something bad comes up, you do more thinking at that point.”

“‎Everything passes. Nobody gets anything for keeps. And that's how we've got to live.”

“Listen, every object's in flux. The Earth, time, concepts, love, life, faith, justice, evil-they're all fluid and in transition. They don't stay in one form or in one place forever. The whole universe is like some big FedEx box.”

“The rain that fell on the city runs down the dark gutters and empties into the sea without even soaking the ground”

“What the world needs is a set villain that people can point at and say, “It’s all your fault!”

“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.”

“The ground we stand on looks solid enough, but if something happens it can drop right out from under you.”

“I'd made it back to the land of the living. No matter how boring or mediocre a world it might be, this was it.”

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

“Ever since that happened to me, I haven't been able to give myself to anyone in this world.”

“I may not be the most likable person in the world, but I try not to upset people.”

“Suicides? Heart attacks? The papers didn't seem interested. The world was full of ways to die, too many to cover. Newsworthy deaths had to be exceptional. Most people go unobserved.”

“[…] Shimamoto had her own little world within her. A world that was for her alone, one I could not enter.”