Haruki Murakami Quotes

Honesty is to truth as prow is to stern. Honesty appears first and truth appears last. The interval between varies in direct proportion to the size of ship. With anything of size, truth takes a long time in coming. Sometimes it only manifests itself posthumously.

~ Haruki Murakami

Whenever an occasion arose in which she needed an opinion on something in the wider world, she borrowed her husband's. If this had been all there was to her, she wouldn't have bothered anyone, but as is so often the case with such women, she suffered from an incurable case of of pretentiousness. Lacking any internalized values of her own, such people can arrive at a standpoint only by adopting other people's standards or views. The only principle that governs their minds is the question How do I look?

~ Haruki Murakami

He decided not to ask for details. Better to avoid exposing his ignorance even further.

~ Haruki Murakami

Lies are terrible things. One could say that the greatest sins afflicting modern society are the proliferation of lies and silence. We lie through our teeth, then swallow our tongues. All the same, were we to speak only the truth all year round, then the truth might lose its value.

~ Haruki Murakami

Telling lies is a really terrible thing. These days, lies and silence are the two greatest sins in human society you might say. In reality, we tell lots of lies, and we often break into silence. However, if we were constant;y talking year-round, and telling only the truth truth would probably lose some of its value.

~ Haruki Murakami

She lived frugally, but her meals were the only things on which she deliberately spent her money. She never compromised on the quality of her groceries, and drank only good-quality wines.

~ Haruki Murakami

Thinking about lunch. Smoked salmon with pedigreed lettuce and razor-sharp slices of onion that have been soaked in ice water, brushed with horseradish and mustard, served on French butter rolls baked in the hot ovens of Kinokuniya. A sandwich made in heaven

~ Haruki Murakami

I said nothing for a time, just ran my fingertips along the edge of the human-shaped emptiness that had been left inside me.

~ Haruki Murakami

The silence is so deep it hurts our ears

~ Haruki Murakami

A moderate silence ensued. A neutral-to-slightly-positive silence. True, silence is still silence, except when you think about it too much.

~ Haruki Murakami

It was a stillness so profound one had to adjust one’s hearing to it.....The silence seemed to be trying to tell him something about itself.

~ Haruki Murakami

I shouted into the phone, but there was no reply. Silence floated up from the receiver like smoke from the mouth of a gun.

~ Haruki Murakami

Were the stars out when I left the house last evening? All I could remember was the couple in the Skyline listening to Duran Duran. Stars? Who remembers stars? Come to think of it, had I even looked up at the sky recently? Had the stars been wiped out of the sky three months ago, I wouldn't have known. The only things I noticed were silver bracelets on women's wrists and popsicle sticks in potted rubber plants. There had to be something wrong with my life. I should have been born a Yugoslavian shepherd who looked up at the Big Dipper every night. No car, no car stereo, no silver bracelets, no shuffling, no dark blue tweed suits.My world foreshortened, flattening into a credit card. Seen head on, things seemed merely skewed, but from the side the view was virtually meaningless—a one-dimensional wafer. Everything about me may have been crammed in there, but it was only plastic. Indecipherable except to some machine.My first circuit must have been wearing thin. My real memories were receding into planar projection, the screen of consciousness losing all identity.

~ Haruki Murakami

I feel very strongly that all Japanese at that time had the idea drilled into them of 1999 being the end of the world. Aum renunciates have already accepted, inside themselves, the end of the world, because when they become a renunciate, they discard themselves totally, thereby abandoning the world. In other words, Aum is a collection of people who have accepted the end. People who continue to hold out hope for the near future still have an attachment to the world. If you have attachments, you will not discard your Self, but for Renunciates it's as if they've leaped right off the cliff. And taking a giant leap like that feels good. They lose something - but gain something in return.

~ Haruki Murakami

Sometimes I just get tired. I get headaches, and I just lose track. I mean, it's like which is me and which is the role? Where's the line between me and my shadow?

~ Haruki Murakami

Sorel's basic character flaws had all cemented by the age of fifteen, a fact which further elicited my sympathy. To have all the building blocks of your life in place by that age was, by any standard, a tragedy. It was as good as sealing yourself into a dungeon. Walled in, with nowhere to go but your own doom. Walls. A world completely surrounded by walls.

~ Haruki Murakami

She was seriously in love, but she never made demands.

~ Haruki Murakami

My words did not seem to reach her. Or, if they did, she was unable to grasp their meaning.

~ Haruki Murakami

A cell is just a room if you don't lock the door.

~ Haruki Murakami

Energies expended on sideshows, never on the main event. Where the hell was the main event? Was there a main event?

~ Haruki Murakami

I'm still not sure I made the right choice when I told my wife about the bakery attack.But then,it might not have been a question of right or wrong. Which is to say that wrong choices can produce right results, and vice versa. I myself have adopted the position that,in fact, we never choose anything at all. Things happen. Or not.

~ Haruki Murakami

If you have to choose between something that has form and something that doesn't, go for the one without form. That's my rule.

~ Haruki Murakami

In ancient times, people weren't just male or female, but one of three types: male/male, male/female, 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 a 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

People do change. And no matter how close we once were, and how much we opened up to each other, maybe neither of us know anything substantial about the other.

~ Haruki Murakami

People do change. And no matter how close we once were, and how much we opened up to each other, maybe neither if us know anything substantial about the other.

~ Haruki Murakami

I'm the scratchy stuff on the side of the matchbox. But that's fine with me. I don't mind at all. Better to be a first-class matchbox than a second-class match.

~ Haruki Murakami

Nobody chooses to evolve. It's like floods and avalanches and earthquakes. You never know what's happening until they hit, then it's too late.

~ Haruki Murakami

Everybody thinks I'm this delicate little girl.

~ Haruki Murakami

Closing your eyes isn't going to change anything. Nothing's going to disappear just because you can't see what's going on. In fact, things will even be worse the next time you open your eyes.

~ Haruki Murakami

So the fact that I’m me and no one else is one of my greatest assets. Emotional hurt is the price a person has to pay in order to be independent.

~ Haruki Murakami

Our faces were no more than ten inches apart, but she was light years away from me.

~ Haruki Murakami

Violence does not always take visible form, and not all wounds gush blood.

~ Haruki Murakami

It may well be that we can never fully adapt to our own deformities. Unable tofind a place inside ourselves for the very real pain and suffering that these deformities cause, we come here to get away from such things. As long as we are here, we can get by without hurting others or being hurt by them because we know that we are deformed. That's whatdistinguishes us from the outside world: most people go about their lives unconscious of their deformities, while in this little world of ours the deformities themselves are a precondition. Just as Indians wearfeathers on their heads to show what tribe they belong to, we wear our deformities in the open. And we live quietly so as not to hurt one another.

~ Haruki Murakami

That's what we all do : endlessly take the long way around.

~ Haruki Murakami

At the same time that 'I' am the content of a relation, 'I' am also that which does the relating.

~ Haruki Murakami

All kinds of things are happening to me. I begin. Some I choose, some I didn't. I don't know how to tell one from the other any more. What I mean is, it feels like everything's been decided in advance - that I'm following a path somebody else has already mapped out for me. It doesn't matter how much I think things over, how much effort I put into it. In fact, the harder I try, the more I lose my sense od who I am. It's as if my identity's an orbit that I've strayed far away from, and that really hurts. But more than that, it scares me. Just thinking about it makes me flinch.Oshima gazes deep into m eyes. Listen, Kafka. What you are experiencing now is the motif od many Greek tragedies. Man does not chose fate. Fate chooses man. That is the basic world view of Greek drama. And the sense od tragedy - according to Aristotle - somes, ironically enough, not drom the protagonist's weak points but from his good qualities. Do you know what I am getting at? People are drawn deeper into tragedy not by their defects but by their virtues. Sophocles' Oedipus Rex being a Great example. Oedipus is drawn into tragedy not because of lazines or stupidity, but because of his courage and honesty. So an inevitable irony results.

~ Haruki Murakami

Certain kinds of information are like smoke: they work their way into people's eyes and minds whether sought out or not, and with no regard to personal preference.

~ Haruki Murakami

We were young, and we had no need for prophecies. Just living was itself an act of prophecy.

~ Haruki Murakami

Hey, you know that thing Dostoyevesky wrote on gambling? It's like that. When you're surrounded by endless possibilities, one of the hardest things you can do is pass them up.

~ Haruki Murakami

It seemed unreasonable, unfair, that a woman so young and beautiful should be so exhausted. Of course, it was neither unreasonable nor unfair. Exhaustion pays no mind to age and beauty. Like rain and earthquakes and hail and floods.

~ Haruki Murakami