Haruki Murakami Quotes

No truth can cure the sorrow 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 it through to the end and learn something from it, but what we learn will be no help in facing the next sorrow that comes to us without warning.

~ Haruki Murakami

People leave strange little memories of themselves behind when they die.

~ Haruki Murakami

Tell me, Doctor, are you afraid of death?I guess it depends on how you die.

~ Haruki Murakami

Aren't you afraid of dying?Not really. I've watched lots of good-for-nothing, worthless people die, and if people like that can do it, then I should be able to handle it.

~ Haruki Murakami

My peak? Would I even have one? I hardly had had anything you could call a life. A few ripples. some rises and falls. But that's it. Almost nothing. Nothing born of nothing. I'd loved and been loved, but I had nothing to show. It was a singularly plain, featureless landscape. I felt like I was in a video game. A surrogate Pacman, crunching blindly through a labyrinth of dotted lines. The only certainty was my death.

~ Haruki Murakami

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

~ Haruki Murakami

Those were strange days, now that I look back at them. In the midst of life, everything revolved around death.

~ Haruki Murakami

I'm not afraid to die. What I'm afraid of is having reality get the better of me, of having reality leave me behind.

~ Haruki Murakami

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.

~ Haruki Murakami

I’ve never once thought about how I was going to die,” she said. “I can’t think about it. I don’t even know how I’m going to live.

~ Haruki Murakami

Death leaves cans of shaving cream half-used.

~ Haruki Murakami

A poet might die at twenty-one, a revolutionary or a rock star at twenty four. But after that you assume everything’s going to be all right. you’ve made it past Dead Man’s Curve and you’re out of the tunnel, cruising straight for your destination down a six lane highway whether you want it or not.

~ Haruki Murakami

I find myself thinking about my ongoing existence as a human being and the path that lies ahead of me. Though of course these thoughts lead to but one place - death.

~ Haruki Murakami

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.

~ Haruki Murakami

Aku akan bahagia jika aku dan lari bisa menua bersama.

~ Haruki Murakami

Luka fisik memang diperlukan saat mempelajari sesuatu yang penting dalam hidup.

~ Haruki Murakami

In those days I used to talk to myself as if reciting poetry.

~ Haruki Murakami

There's no such thing as perfect writing, just like there's no such thing as perfect despair.

~ Haruki Murakami

If you're young and talented, it's like you have wings.

~ Haruki Murakami

It just happens to be the way that I'm made. I have to write things down to feel I fully comprehend them.

~ Haruki Murakami

If she did experience sex--or something close to it--in high school, I'm sure it would have been less out of sexual desire or love than literary curiosity.

~ Haruki Murakami

The thoughts that occur to me while I’m running are like clouds in the sky. Clouds of all different sizes. They come and they go, while the sky remains the same sky always. The clouds are mere guests in the sky that pass away and vanish, leaving behind the sky.

~ Haruki Murakami

Generally, people who are good at writing letters have no need to write letters. They've got plenty of life to lead inside their own context.

~ Haruki Murakami

I want to write about people who dream and wait for the night to end, who long for the light so they can hold the ones they love.

~ Haruki Murakami

That's how it is with art. Mere humans who root through their refrigerators at three o'clock in the morning are incapable of such writing.

~ Haruki Murakami

Hundreds of butterflies flitted in and out of sight like short-lived punctuation marks in a stream of consciousness without beginning or end.

~ Haruki Murakami

You like to write. It's the single most important quality for someone who wants to be a writer. But not in itself enough.

~ Haruki Murakami

I write weird stories. I don't know why I like weirdness so much. Myself, I'm a very realistic person. I don't trust anything New Age -- or reincarnation, dreams, Tarot, horoscopes. I don't trust anything like that at all. I wake up at 6 in the morning and go to bed at 10, jogging every day and swimming, eating healthy food. I'm very realistic. But when I write, I write weird. That's very strange. When I'm getting more and more serious, I'm getting more and more weird. When I want to write about the reality of society and the world, it gets weird. Many people ask me why, and I can't answer that. But I recognized when I was interviewing those 63 ordinary people -- they were very straightforward, very simple, very ordinary, but their stories were sometimes very weird. That was interesting.

~ Haruki Murakami

My short stories are like soft shadows I have set out in the world, faint footprints I have left. I remember exactly where I set down each and every one of them, and how I felt when I did. Short stories are like guideposts to my heart...

~ Haruki Murakami

Dreaming is the day job of novelists, but sharing our dreams is a still more important task for us. We cannot be novelists without this sense of sharing something.

~ Haruki Murakami

I love pop culture -- the Rolling Stones, the Doors, David Lynch, things like that. That's why I said I don't like elitism.

~ Haruki Murakami

Writing things was important, wasn't it? Nakata asked.'Yes, it was. The process of writing was important. Even though the finished product is completely meaningless.

~ Haruki Murakami

Or maybe that’s what it’s all about: this religion’s substance is its lack of substance. In McLuhanesque terms, the medium is the message. Some people might find that cool.”“McLuhanesque?”“Hey, look, even I read a book now and then,” Ayumi protested. “McLuhan was ahead of his time. He was so popular for a while that people tend not to take him seriously, but what he had to say was right.”“In other words, the package itself is the contents. Is that it?”“Exactly. The characteristics of the package determine the nature of the contents, not the other way around.

~ Haruki Murakami

In ancient times people weren't just male or female, but one of three types: male/male, male/female, or female/female. In other words, each person was made out of the components of two people. Everyone was happy with this arrangement and never really gave it much thought. But then God took a knife and cut everybody in half, right down the middle. So after that the world was divided just into male and female, the upshot being that people spend their time running around trying to locate their missing other half.

~ Haruki Murakami

There were times he thought it would have been far better to never have known. Yet he continued to return to his core principle: that, in every situation, knowledge was better than ignorance. However agonizing, it was necessary to confront the facts. Only through knowing could a person become strong.

~ Haruki Murakami

Of course it hurt that we could never love each other in a physical way. We would have been far more happy if we had. But that was like the tides, the change of seasons--something immutable, an immovable destiny we could never alter. No matter how cleverly we might shelter it, our delicate friendship wasn't going to last forever. We were bound to reach a dead end. That was painfully clear.

~ Haruki Murakami

So that’s how we live our lives. No matter how deep and fatal theloss, no matter how important the thing that's stolen from us - that'ssnatched right out of our hands - even if we are left completelychanged, with only the outer layer of skin from before, we continue toplay out our lives this way, in silence. We draw ever nearer to theend of our allotted span of time, bidding it farewell as it trails offbehind. Repeating, often adroitly, the endless deeds of the everyday. Leaving behind a feeling of insurmountable emptiness...Maybe, in some distant place, everything is already, quietly, lost.Or at least there exists a silent place where everything candisappear, melting together in a single, overlapping figure. And aswe live our lives we discover - drawing toward us the thin threadsattached to each - what has been lost. I closed my eyes and tried tobring to mind as many beautiful lost things as I could. Drawing themcloser, holding on to them. Knowing all the while that their livesare fleeting.

~ Haruki Murakami

It's just a feeling I have. What you see with your eyes is not necessarily real. My enemy is, among other things, the me inside me.

~ Haruki Murakami

Tendencies. Yougottendencies. Soevenifyoudideverythingoveragain, yourwholelife, yougottendenciestodojustwhatyoudid, alloveragain. -The Sheep Man.

~ Haruki Murakami

Things change everyday. With each new dawn, it is not the same world as before. And you’re not the same person you were either.

~ Haruki Murakami