Haruki Murakami quotes

Haruki Murakami is a Japanese novelist and translator, acclaimed for his surreal and imaginative storytelling. His works seamlessly blend elements of magical realism, pop culture, and deeply introspective themes. He has received numerous international awards and is considered one of the most influential authors of contemporary literature. Here are 726 of his quotes:

If you're in pitch blackness, all you can do is sit tight until your eyes get used to the dark.

Haruki Murakami

Death is not the opposite of life, but a part of it.

Haruki Murakami

If you remember me, then I don't care if everyone else forgets.

Haruki Murakami

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

Haruki Murakami

Understanding' is merely the sum total of our misunderstandings.

Haruki Murakami

Spend your money on the things money can buy. Spend your time on the things money can't buy.

Haruki Murakami

Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional.

Haruki Murakami

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

Haruki Murakami

The most important thing we learn at school is the fact that the most important things can't be learned at school.

Haruki Murakami

Whatever it is you're seeking won't come in the form you're expecting.

Haruki Murakami

Don't feel sorry for yourself. Only arseholes do that.

Haruki Murakami

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

Haruki Murakami

Genius or fool, you don't live in the world alone. You can hide underground or you can build a wall around yourself, but somebody's going to come along and screw up the works.

Haruki Murakami

Now for a good twelve-hour sleep, I told myself. Twelve solid hours. Let birds sing, let people go to work. Somewhere out there, a volcano might blow, Israeli commandos might decimate a Palestinian village. I couldn't stop it. I was going to sleep.

Haruki Murakami

That's wrong," she declared. "Everyone must have one thing that they can excel at. It's just a matter of drawing it out, isn't it? But school doesn't know how to draw it out. It crushes the gift. It's no wonder most people never get to be what they want to be. They just get ground down.

Haruki Murakami

But even so, every now and then I would feel a violent stab of loneliness. The very water I drink, the very air I breathe, would feel like long, sharp needles. The pages of a book in my hands would take on the threatening metallic gleam of razor blades. I could hear the roots of loneliness creeping through me when the world was hushed at four o'clock in the morning.

Haruki Murakami

Once, when I was younger, I thought I could be someone else. I'd move to Casablanca, open a bar, and I'd meet Ingrid Bergman. Or more realistically - whether actually more realistic or not - I'd tune in on a better life, something more suited to my true self. Toward that end, I had to undergo training. I read The Greening of America, and I saw Easy Rider three times. But like a boat with a twisted rudder, I kept coming back to the same place. I wasn't anywhere. I was myself, waiting on the shore for me to return.

Haruki Murakami

You said that the mind is like the wind but perhaps it is we who are like the wind Knowing nothing, simply blowing through. Never aging, never dying.

Haruki Murakami

People's memories are maybe the fuel they burn to stay alive.

Haruki Murakami

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

Haruki Murakami

Why do people have to be this lonely? What's the point of it all? Millions of people in this world, all of them yearning, looking to others to satisfy them, yet isolating themselves. Why? Was the earth put here just to nourish human loneliness?

Haruki Murakami

When you come out of the storm, you won't be the same person who walked in. That's what this storm's all about.

Haruki Murakami