Haruki Murakami Quotes

Unfortunately, the clock is ticking, the hours are going by. The past increases, the future recedes. Possibilities decreasing, regrets mounting.

~ Haruki Murakami

For a while is a phrase whose length can't be measured.At least by the person who's waiting.

~ Haruki Murakami

Time flows in strange ways on Sundays, and sights become mysteriously distorted.

~ Haruki Murakami

Time really is one big continuous cloth, no? We habitually cut out pieces of time to fit us, so we tend to fool ourselves into thinking that time is our size, but it really goes on and on.

~ Haruki Murakami

Silence. How long it lasted, I couldn't tell. It might have been five seconds, it might have been a minute. Time wasn't fixed. It wavered, stretched, shrank. Or was it me that wavered, stretched, and shrank in the silence? I was warped in the folds of time, like a reflection in a fun house mirror.

~ Haruki Murakami

I guess time doesn't flow in order, does it - A, B, C, D? It just sort of goes where it feels like going.

~ Haruki Murakami

The passage of time will usually extract the venom of most things and render them harmless

~ Haruki Murakami

Every story has a time to be told

~ Haruki Murakami

Time does not expand.But time is actually expanding, isn't it? You yourself said that time adds up.That's only because time needed for transit has decreased. The sum total of time doesn't change. It's only that you can see more movies.

~ Haruki Murakami

Sheep hurt my father, and through my father, sheep have also hurt me.

~ Haruki Murakami

Human beings are ultimately nothing but carriers-passageways- for genes. They ride us into the ground like racehorses from generation to generation. Genes don't think about what constitutes good or evil. They don't care whether we are happy or unhappy. We're just means to an end for them. The only thing they think about is what is most efficient for them.

~ Haruki Murakami

When I was little, I had this science book. There was a section on 'What would happen to the world if there was no friction?' Answer: 'Everything on earth would fly into space from the centrifugal force of revolution.' That was my mood.

~ Haruki Murakami

If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking.

~ Haruki Murakami

When I open them, most of the books have the smell of an earlier time leaking out between the pages - a special odor of the knowledge and emotions that for ages have been calmly resting between the covers. Breathing it in, I glance through a few pages before returning each book to its shelf.

~ Haruki Murakami

There weren't any curtains in the windows, and the books that didn't fit into the bookshelf lay piled on the floor like a bunch of intellectual refugees.

~ Haruki Murakami

Have books ‘happened’ to you? Unless your answer to that question is ‘yes,’ I’m unsure how to talk to you

~ Haruki Murakami

The years nineteen and twenty are a crucial stage in the maturation of character, and if you allow yourself to become warped when you're that age, it will cause you pain when you're older.

~ Haruki Murakami

Somewhere between 'not enough' and 'not at all.' I was always hungry for love. Just once, I wanted to know what it was like to get my fill of it - to be fed so much love I couldn't take any more. Just once. But they never gave that to me. Never, not once.

~ Haruki Murakami

The journey I'm taking is inside me. Just like blood travels down veins, what I'm seeing is my inner self and what seems threatening is just the echo of the fear in my heart.

~ Haruki Murakami

A healthy amount of fear and respect might be a good idea

~ Haruki Murakami

From the moment of my birth, I lived with pain at the center of my life. My only purpose in life was to find a way to coexist with intense pain.

~ Haruki Murakami

I myself, as I’m writing, don’t know who did it. The readers and I are on the same ground. When I start to write a story, I don’t know the conclusion at all and I don’t know what’s going to happen next. If there is a murder case as the first thing, I don’t know who the killer is. I write the book because I would like to find out. If I know who the killer is, there’s no purpose to writing the story.

~ Haruki Murakami

Even now, whenever I think of her, I envision a quiet Sunday morning. A gentle, clear day, just getting under way. No homework to do, just a Sunday when you could do what you wanted. She always gave me this kick-back-and-relax, Sunday-morning kind of feeling.

~ Haruki Murakami

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.

~ Haruki Murakami

In that sense, this is not a standard book of interviews. Nor is it what you might call a book of 'celebrity conversations.' What I was searching for - with increasing clarity as the sessions progressed - was something akin to the heart's natural resonance. What I did my best to hear, of course, was that resonance coming from Ozawa's heart. After all, in our conversations I was the interviewer and he was the interviewee. But what I often heard at the same time was the resonance of my own heart. At times that resonance was something I recognized as having long been a part of me, and at other times it came as a complete surprise. In other words, through a kind of sympathetic vibration that occurred during all of these conversations, I may have been simultaneously discovering Seiji Ozawa and, bit by bit, Haruki Murakami.

~ Haruki Murakami

I have met many different people in the course of my life, some of whom I have come to know pretty well, but where these three traits are concerned, I had never encountered anyone before Seiji Ozawa with whom I found it so easy and natural to identify. In that sense, he is a precious person to me. It sets my mind at ease to know that there is someone like him in the world.

~ Haruki Murakami

When people tell a lie about something, they have to make up a bunch of lies to go with the first one. ‘Mythomania’ is the word for it.

~ Haruki Murakami

I think that my job is to observe people and the world, and not to judge them. I always hope to position myself away from so-called conclusions. I would like to leave everything wide open to all the possibilities in the world.

~ Haruki Murakami

Can'ttrustpeople. Won'tdoanygood. They'llkillyoueverytime. They'llkilleachother. They'llkilleveryone.

~ Haruki Murakami

People lose fifty million skin cells every day. The cells get scraped off and turn into invisible dust, and disappear into the air. Maybe we are nothing but skin cells as far as the world is concerned.

~ Haruki Murakami

Don’t you see? You and he might never cross paths again. Of course, a chance meeting could occur, and I hope it happens. I really do, for your sake. But realistically speaking, you have to see there’s a huge possibility you’ll never be able to meet him again. And even if you do meet, he might already be married to somebody else. He might have two kids. Isn’t that so? And in that case, you may have to live the rest of your life alone, never being joined with the one person you love in all the world. Don’t you find that scary?

~ Haruki Murakami

I all of a sudden got to feeling like talking to people. Whenever I look at the ocean, I always want to talk to people, but when I’m talking to people, I always want to look at the ocean. I’m weird like that.

~ Haruki Murakami

Listen up - there's no war that will end all wars.

~ Haruki Murakami

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

~ Haruki Murakami

The answer is dreams. Dreaming on and on. Entering the world of dreams and never coming out. Living in dreams for the rest of time.

~ Haruki Murakami

In dreams you don't need to make any distinctions between things. Not at all. Boundaries don't exist. So in dreams there are hardly ever collisions. Even if there are, they don't hurt. Reality is different. Reality bites. Reality, reality.

~ Haruki Murakami

Dreams come from the past, not from the future. Dreams shouldn't control you--you should control them.

~ Haruki Murakami

In dreams begins responsiblities.

~ Haruki Murakami

There are symbolic dreams-- dreams that symbolize some reality. Then there are symbolic realities -- realities that symbolize a dream. Symbols are what you might call the honorary town councillors of the worm universe. In the worm universe, there is nothing unusual about a dairy cow seeking a pair of pliers. A cow is bound to get her pliers sometime. It has nothing to do with me.

~ Haruki Murakami

I closed my eyes and tried to sleep. But it was not until much later that I was able to get any real sleep. In a place far away from anyone or anywhere, I drifted off for a moment.

~ Haruki Murakami