Haruki Murakami Quotes

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

“Maybe she thought the garbage and rocks in your head were interesting. But finally, garbage is garbage and rocks are rocks.”

“Nakata's empty inside… Do you know what it means to be completely empty? Being empty is like a vacant house. An unlocked, vacant house. Anybody can come in, anytime they want. That's what scares me the most”

“My grandpa always said asking a question is embarrassing for a moment, but not asking is embarrassing for a lifetime.”

“I wondered if she was trying to convey something to me, something she could not put into words - something prior to words that she could not grasp within herself and which therefore had no hope of ever turning into words.”

“It is sometimes necessary for each person. Fill up with delicious food, get drunk, sing loudly and chat frivolously.”

“It's not me but the world that's deranged.”

“I dream. Sometimes I think that’s the only right thing to do. To dream, to live in the world of dreams. But it doesn’t last forever. Wakefulness always comes to take me back.”

“Life is here, death is over there. I am here, not over there.”

“Everytime you see a flood like that on the news you tell yourself: That's it. That's my heart.”

“Our hearts are not stones. A stone may disintegrate in time and lose its outward form. But hearts never disintegrate. They have no outward form, and whether good or evil, we can always communicate them to one another.”

“Mediocrity is a constant, as one Russian writer put it. Russians have a way with aphorisms. They probably spend all winter thinking them up.”

“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.”

“If you think of someone enough, you’re sure to meet them again.”

“There are lots of things we never understand, no matter how many years we put on, no matter how much experience we accumulate.”

“The world is an inherently unfair place.”

“You don't have to judge the whole world by your own standards. Not everybody is like you, you know.”

“Is action merely the incidental product of thought, or is thought the consequential product of action?”

“Such wounds to the heart will probably never heal. But we cannot simply sit and stare at our wounds forever.”

“Wherever there's hope there's a trial.”

“The best musicians transpose consciousness into sound; painters do the same for color and shape.”

“It's a question of attitude. If you really work at something you can do it up to a point. If you really work at being happy you can do it up to a point. But anything more than that you can't. Anything more than that is luck.”

“It's not right for one friend to do all the giving and the other to do all the taking: that's not read friendship.”

“Between the time the last train leaves and the first train arrives, the place changes: it's not the same as in daytime.”

“Life: I'll never understand it.”

“The heart apparently doesn’t stop that easily.”

“He does not exist here, with me, but flesh that does not exist will never die, and promises unmade are never broken.”

“Mental acuity was never born from comfortable circumstances.”

“What if I’ve forgotten the most important thing? What if somewhere inside me there is a dark limbo where all the truly important memories are heaped and slowly turning into mud?… the thought fills me with an almost unbearable sorrow.”

“We live in a pretty apathetic age, yet we’re surrounded by an enormous amount of information about other people. If you feel like it, you can easily gather that information about them. Having said that, we still hardly know anything about people.”

“Sometimes, however, this sense of isolation, like acid spilling out of a bottle, can unconsciously eat away at a person’s heart and dissolve it.”

“In most cases learning something essential in life requires physical pain.”

“I'm your phantom dance partner. I'm your shadow. I'm not anything more.”

“What if I’ve forgotten the most important thing?”

“The world is full of ways and means to waste time.”

“No matter how far you travel, you can never get away from yourself. It’s like your shadow. It follows you everywhere. -Komura”

“If there’s something I can’t do but want to, I won’t relax until I’m able to do it.”

“So this was how secrets got started, I thought to myself. People constructed them little by little.”

“Nobody's easier to fool, than the person who is convinced that he is right.”

“I just run. I run in void. Or maybe I should put it the other way: I run in order to acquire a void.”

“Now all you can do is wait. It must be hard for you, but there is a right time for everything. Like the ebb and flow of tides. No one can do anything to change them. When it is time to wait, you must wait.”

“The world in books seemed so much more alive to me than anything outside. I could see things I'd never seen before. Books and music were my best friends. I had a couple of good friends at school, but never met anyone I could really speak my heart to.”

“The pillow smells like the sunlight, a precious smell.”

“In his own way, he's lived life with all the intensity he could muster.”

“Sometimes you’re just the sweetest thing. Like Christmas, summer vacation, and a brand-new puppy rolled into one.”

“I would never see her again, except in memory. She was here, and now she's gone. There is no middle ground. Probably is a word that you may find south of the border. But never, ever west of the sun.”

“You can have tons of talent, but it won't necessarily keep you fed. If you have sharp instincts, through, you'll never go hungry.”

“Of what value is a civilization that can't toast a piece of bread as ordered?”

“We never choose anything at all. Things happen. Or not.”

“Probably."
"Again with the probablys."
"A world full of probablys," she said.”