Haruki Murakami Quotes

There's a need, too, for a special name in order to distinguish between this present world and the f...

This is what it means to live on. When granted hope, a person uses it as fuel, as a guidepost to lif...

If you can love someone with your whole heart, even one person, then there's salvation in life. Even...

The role of a story was, in the broadest terms, to transpose a single problem into another form. ......

A person's last moments are an important thing. You can't choose how you're born, but you can choose...

It's basically the same in all periods of societies. If you belong to the majority, you can avoid th...

Even if things were the same, people's perception of them might have been very different back then. ...

This may be the most important proposition revealed by history: 'At the time, no one knew what was c...

But hell, you've gotta work with what you've got.

The third dream was hard to put into words. It was a rambling, incoherent dream without any setting....

When you prick a person with a needle, red blood comes out- that's the real world.

Once you pass a certain age, life becomes noting more than a process of continual loss. Things that ...

Being alive, if you had to define it, meant emitting a variety of smells

Sex with a married woman ten years his senior was stress free and fulfilling, because it couldn't le...

In the name of God, they stole her time and her freedom, putting shackles on her heart. They preache...

But there are certain meanings that are lost forever the moment they are explained in words.

It's just that you're about to do something out of the ordinary. And after you do something like tha...

Because you are neither an angel nor a god. I am quite aware that your actions have been prompted by...

But still," Ayumi said, "it seems to me that this world has a serious shortage of both logic and kin...

If you can't understand it without an explanation, you can't understand it with an explanation.

I can bear any pain as long as it has meaning.

You throw a stone into a deep pond. Splash. The sound is big, and it reverberates throughout the sur...

She lived frugally, but her meals were the only things on which she deliberately spent her money. Sh...

Guns are like cars: you can trust a good used one better than one that's brand new.

A certain something, he felt, had managed to work its way in through a tiny opening and was trying t...

I'm tired of living unable to love anyone. I don't have a single friend - not one. And, worst of all...

It's not so easy for people to end their own lives. It's not like in the movies. There, they do it l...

For some reason all the middle-aged women he knew were very efficient.

...somewhere, on some subterranean level, her darkness and his may have connected.

No matter how much suffering you went through, you never wanted to let go of those memories.

The sky both exists and doesn’t exist. It has substance and at the same time doesn’t. And we merely ...

I know how fiction matters to me, because if I want to express myself, I have to make up a story. So...

The laugh left a bitter taste in our mouths, but we laughed out all the same.

When you come out of the storm you won't be the same person that walked in. That's what the storm is...

You have to dream intentionally. Most people dream a dream when they are asleep. But to be a writer,...

My father belongs to the generation that fought the war in the 1940s. When I was a kid my father tol...

I think most readers would say the same. Most would choose Midori. And the protagonist, of course, c...

once your get your hopes up, your mind starts acting on its own. And when your hopes are dashed you ...

Among the many values in life, I appreciate freedom most.

A person's last moments are an important thing. Yuou can't choose how you're born, but you can choos...

There's no sense forcing yourself if you don't feel like it. Tell you the truth, I've had sex with l...

I really should have died then, Tsukuru often told himself. Then this world, the one in the here and...

I was much younger, much hungrier, much more alone. But I was myself, pared down to the essentials.

April and May were painful, lonely months for me because I couldn't talk to you. I never knew that s...

I am living in hell from one day to the next. But there is nothing I can do to escape. I don't know ...

Not being able to find the right words at crucial times is one of my many problems.

I think memory is the most important asset of human beings. It’s a kind of fuel; it burns and it war...

All I know is I'm totallyalone. All alone i n an unfamiliar place, like some solitary explorer who's...

And once the storm is over, you won’t remember how you made it through, how you managed to survive. ...

A dense, artistic kind of imperfection stimulates your consciousness, keeps you alert. If I listen t...

A rubber plant is just about the ideal family.

I wasn’t able to be that person for you, and I did a terrible thing. I feel awful about it. But ther...

O.K., so I'm not so smart. I'm working class. But it's the working class that keeps the world runnin...

I dream, sometimes I think that's the only right thing to do.

But in real life things don't go smoothly. At certain points in our lives, when we really need a cle...

Maybe that's why people don't like you. You make it obvious you don't care whether people like you o...

I don’t think it’s right that I’m part of the problem. I can’t be part of the solution if I’m part o...

It's a dark, cool, quiet place. A basement in your soul. And that place can sometimes be dangerous t...

I've run the Boston Marathon 6 times before. I think the best aspects of the marathon are the beauti...

That amazing time in our lives is gone, and will never return. All the beautiful possibilities we ha...

Count your blessings

You lost all interest in this world. You were disappointed and discouraged, and lost interest in eve...

You can hide memories, suppress them, but you can’t erase the history that produced them

In the novelist's profession, as far as I'm concerned, there's no such thing as winning or losing. M...

Gays, lesbians, straights, feminists, fascist pigs, communists, Hare Krishnas - none of them bother ...

Team sports aren't my thing. I find it easier to pick something up if I can do it at my own speed. A...

People want to be bowled over by something special. Nine times out of ten you might strike out, but ...

I think that my job is to observe people and the world, and not to judge them. I always hope to posi...

If there is a hard, high wall and an egg that breaks against it, no matter how right the wall or how...

To Tengo, sexual desire was fundamentally an extension of a means of communication. And so, to look ...

If you can love someone with your whole heart, even one person, then there’s salvation in life. Even...

Writing a novel is like having a dream.

I get up early in the morning, 4 o'clock, and I sit at my desk and what I do is just dream. After th...

The others in the dorm thought I wanted to be a writer, because I was always alone with a book, but ...

Maybe you didn't want to get married, or get tied down?'Tsukuru shook his head. 'No, I don't think t...

A question wells up inside me, a question so big it blocks my throat and makes it hard to breathe. S...

All kinds of things are happening to me." I begin. ,,Some I choose, some I didn't. I don't know how ...

it's a fine moon', she repeated

Robbing people of their actual history is the same as robbing them of part of themselves. It’s a cri...

If I choose to write about sheep, it's just because I happened to write about sheep. There is no dee...

I myself, as I’m writing, don’t know who did it. The readers and I are on the same ground. When I st...

Next she turned the gun upward and thrust the muzzle into her mouth. Now it was aimed directly at he...

I think of human existence as being like a two-story house. On the rst oor people gather together to...

And while he sat there on the end of the jetty, he’d let the sound of the waves fill his ears, watch...

(When asked “Was the model for Midori (a character in Norwegian Wood) modeled after your wife?”)I sh...

It was nothing but a hole, a mouth open wide. You could lean over the edge and peer down to see noth...

Anyway, I forgot all about him once I graduated. So quickly and easily, it was weird. What was it ab...

You’re here,” I continued. “At least you look as if you’re here. But maybe you aren’t. Maybe it’s ju...

Reality is created out of confusion and contradiction, and if you exclude those elements, you're no ...

I lost some of my friends because I got so famous, people who just assumed that I would be different...

There are some things we can never assign to oblivion, memories we can never rub away. They remain w...

Have books ‘happened’ to you? Unless your answer to that question is ‘yes,’ I’m unsure how to talk t...

He stopped complaining, but now I was annoyed. I went to the roof and drank alone.

Dreaming is the day job of novelists, but sharing our dreams is a still more important task for us. ...

Rock and roll was my favorite, but before long I grew to enjoy Shinamoto's brand of classical music....

My short stories are like soft shadows I have set out in the world, faint footprints I have left. I ...

To what extent facts we recognize as such really are as they seem, and to what extent these are fact...

As I suspect is true of many who write for a living, as I write I think about all sorts of things. I...

Don't forget - you're the one who swam across the freezing sea at night.

But you knoe, she's right. Every single day, each time I see her face, see her, it's utterly preciou...

People think of all kinds of things at three in the morning. We all do. That's why we each have to f...