Haruki Murakami Quotes

I wasn't in love with her. And she didn't love me. For me the question of love was irrelevant. What I sought was the sense of being tossed about by some raging, savage force, in the midst of which lay something absolutely crucial. I had no idea what that was. But I wanted to thrust my hand right inside her body and touch it, whatever it was.

~ Haruki Murakami

Her cry was the saddest sound of orgasm that I had ever heard.

~ Haruki Murakami

Once you’re lost, you panic. You’re in total despair, not knowing what to do. I hate it when that happens. Sex can be a real pain that way, ‘cause when you get in the mood all you can think about is what’s right under your nose - that’s sex, all right.

~ Haruki Murakami

It's a funny thing sensing someone else's sex drive. After a while, you get to mistaking it for your own.

~ Haruki Murakami

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

~ Haruki Murakami

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

~ Haruki Murakami

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. Kids' hearts are malleable, but once they gel it's hard to get them back the way they were.

~ Haruki Murakami

The music world is where child prodigies go to die.

~ Haruki Murakami

Your heart is like a great river after a long spell of rain, spilling over its banks. All signposts that once stood on the ground are gone, inundated and carried away by that rush of water. And still the rain beats down on the surface of the river. Every time you see a flood like that on the news you tell yourself: That’s it. That’s my heart.

~ Haruki Murakami

It was a strange feeling, like touching a void.

~ Haruki Murakami

In the end, like so many beautiful promises in our lives, that dinner date never came to be.

~ Haruki Murakami

Exactly. When is comes to anything halfway important, you just don't get it. It's amazing to me that you can put a piece of fiction together''Yeah, well, that's a whole different thing.'(from Honey Pie)

~ Haruki Murakami

Memory is like fiction: or else it's fiction that's like memory.

~ Haruki Murakami

Memory is like fiction: or else it' fiction that's like memory.

~ Haruki Murakami

The new day is almost here, but the old one is still dragging its heavy skirts. Just as ocean water and river water struggle against each other at a river mouth, the old time and the new time clash and blend.

~ Haruki Murakami

Next she turned the gun upward and thrust the muzzle into her mouth. Now it was aimed directly at her cerebrum-- the gray labyrinth where consciousness resided.

~ Haruki Murakami

It was as if - this something I thought of only later, of course - she was gently peeling back one layer after another that covered a person's heart, a very sensual feeling.

~ Haruki Murakami

There are some things in this world that can be done over, and some that can't. And time passing is one thing that can't be redone. Come this tar, and you can't come back.

~ Haruki Murakami

There are some things in this world that can be done over, and some that can't. And time passing is one thing that can't be undone. Come this far, and you can't go back.

~ Haruki Murakami

It was as if-this is something I thought of only later, of course-she was gently peeling bcd one layer after another hat covered a person's heart, a very sensual feeling.

~ Haruki Murakami

It was as if - this something I thought of only later, of course - she were gently peeling back one layer after another that covered a person's heart, a very sensual feeling.

~ Haruki Murakami

A giant octopus living way down deep at the bottom of the ocean. It has this tremendously powerful life force, a bunch of long, undulating legs, and it's heading somewhere, moving through the darkness of the ocean… It takes on all kinds of different shapes—sometimes it's 'the nation,' and sometimes it's 'the law,' and sometimes it takes on shapes that are more difficult and dangerous than that. You can try cutting off its legs, but they just keep growing back. Nobody can kill it. It's too strong, and it lives too far down in the ocean. Nobody knows where its heart is. What I felt then was a deep terror. And a kind of hopelessness, a feeling that I could never run away from this thing, no matter how far I went. And this creature, this thing doesn't give a damn that I'm me or you're you. In its presence, all human beings lose their names and their faces. We all turn into signs, into numbers.

~ Haruki Murakami

If there is a hard, high wall and an egg that breaks against it, no matter how right the wall or how wrong the egg, I will stand on the side of the egg. Why? Because each of us is an egg, a unique soul enclosed in a fragile egg. Each of us is confronting a high wall. The high wall is the system which forces us to do the things we would not ordinarily see fit to do as individuals . . . We are all human beings, individuals, fragile eggs. We have no hope against the wall: it's too high, too dark, too cold. To fight the wall, we must join our souls together for warmth, strength. We must not let the system control us -- create who we are. It is we who created the system. (Jerusalem Prize acceptance speech, JERUSALEM POST, Feb. 15, 2009)

~ Haruki Murakami

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

~ Haruki Murakami

Every person should decide for himself how happy, or unhappy, our society might be.

~ Haruki Murakami

Forgive me for stating the obvious, but the world is made up of all kinds of people. Other people have their own value to live by, and the same holds true with me.

~ Haruki Murakami

What I was chasing in circles must have been the tail of the darkness inside me.

~ Haruki Murakami

I should have learned many things from that experience, but when I look back on it, all I gained was one single, undeniable fact. That ultimately I am a person who can do evil. I never consciously tried to hurt anyone, yet good intentions notwithstanding, when necessity demanded, I could become completely self-centered, even cruel. I was the kind of person who could, using some plausible excuse, inflict on a person I cared for a wound that would never heal.College transported me to a new town, where I tried, one more time, to reinvent myself. Becoming someone new, I could correct the errors of my past. At first I was optimistic: I could pull it off. But in the end, no matter where I went, I could never change. Over and over I made the same mistake, hurt other people, and hurt myself in the bargain.Just after I turned twenty, this thought hit me: Maybe I've lost the chance to ever be a decent human being. The mistakes I'd committed—maybe they were part of my very makeup, an inescapable part of my being. I'd hit rock bottom, and I knew it.

~ Haruki Murakami

I should have learned many things from that experience, but when I look back on it, all I gained was one single, undeniable fact. That ultimately I am a person who can do evil. I never consciously tried to hurt anyone, yet good intentions notwithstanding, when necessity demanded, I could become completely self-centered, even cruel. I was the kind of person who could, using some plausible excuse, inflict on a person I cared for a wound that would never heal.

~ Haruki Murakami

Most of the psychological differences between men and women seem to come from differences in their reproductive system

~ Haruki Murakami

once your get your hopes up, your mind starts acting on its own. And when your hopes are dashed you get dissapointed, and dissapointment leads to a feeling of helplessness. You get careless and let your guard down. And right now, she though, that si the last thing I can afford.

~ Haruki Murakami

If there's any guy crazy enough to attack me, I'm going to show him the end of the world -- close up. I'm going to let him see the kingdom come with his own eyes. I'm going to send him straight to the southern hemisphere and let the ashes of death rain all over him and the kangaroos and the wallabies.

~ Haruki Murakami

No truth can cure the sadness we feel from losing a loved one. No truth, no sincerity, no strength, no kindness, can cure that sorrow. All we can do is see that sadness through to the end andlearn something from it, but what we learn will be no help in facing the next sadness that comes to us without warning.

~ Haruki Murakami

Living like an empty shell is not really living, no matter how many years it might go on

~ Haruki Murakami

Living and dying are, in a sense, of equal value.

~ Haruki Murakami

What I want is for the two of us to meet somewhere by chance one day, like, passing on the street, or getting on the same bus.

~ Haruki Murakami

A certain something, he felt, had managed to work its way in through a tiny opening and was trying to fill a blank space inside him. The void was not one that she had made. It had always been there inside him. She had merely managed to shine a special light on it.

~ Haruki Murakami

A person’s destiny is something you look back at afterwards, not something to be known in advance.

~ Haruki Murakami

With each passing moment I'm becoming part of the past. There is no future for me, just the past steadily accumulating.

~ Haruki Murakami

At some point the future becomes reality. And then it quickly becomes the past.

~ Haruki Murakami