Haruki Murakami Quotes

How much do you love me?' Midori asked. 'Enough to melt all the tigers in the world to butter,' I said.

As long as I was alive, I was something. That was just how it was. But somewhere along the way it all changed. Living turned me into nothing.

At times like this, adults need a drink

It's the real world, full of gaps and inconsistencies and anticlimaxes.

In the world we live in, what we know and what we don't know are like Siamese twins, inseparable, existing in a state of confusion.

Forgive me for stating the obvious, but the world is made up of all kinds of people.

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.

Precipitate as weather, she appeared from somewhere, then evaporated, leaving only memory.

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.

The power to concentrate was the most important thing. Living without this power would be like opening one’s eyes without seeing anything.

Young people these days don't trust anything at all. They want to be free.

I get up early in the morning, 4 o'clock, and I sit at my desk and what I do is just dream. After three or four hours, that's enough. In the afternoon, I run.

You can see a person's whole life in the cancer they get.

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

Whenever she felt like crying, she would instead become angry—at someone else or at herself—which meant that it was rare for her to shed tears.

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

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

There is nothing in this world that never takes a step outside a person's heart.

Loneliness becomes an acid that eats away at you.

Not just beautiful, though--the stars are like the trees in the forest, alive and breathing. And they're watching me.

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.

The Earth, time, concepts, love, life, faith justice, evil - they're all fluid and in transition. They don't stay in one form or in one place forever. The whole universe is like some big FedEx box.

Despite your best efforts, people are going to be hurt when it's time for them to be hurt.

When I start to write, I don't have any plan at all. I just wait for the story to come.

It was as if I were writing letters to hold together the pieces of my crumbling life.

I like to read books. I like to listen to music.

I move, therefore I am.

Writers have to keep on writing if they want to mature, like caterpillars endlessly chewing on leaves.

Until the bitter end, the emptiness inside her was hers alone.

I have no models in Japanese literature. I created my own style, my own way.

Concentration is one of the happiest things in my life.

She was hearing everything that went on in his heart, like a person who can trace a map with his fingertip and conjure up vivid, living scenery.

You don't have to judge the whole world by your own standards. Not everybody is like you, you know.

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

In the spring of her twenty-second year, Sumire fell in love for the first time in her life.

I myself have been on my own and utterly independent since I graduated. I haven't belonged to any company or any system. It isn't easy to live like this in Japan.

A girl doesn't always want to go out, you know, Mr. Wind-Up Bird. Sometimes she feels like being nasty--like, if the guy's gonna wait, let him really wait.

I couldn't tell wether the hole that opened up inside me was from missing you or from the change of season

After all this, I won't start to hate you.

If only I could fall sound asleep and wake up in my old reality!

You make do with what you have. As you age you learn even to be happy with what you have.

I can be hurt, you know. I can get as exhausted as anybody else. I can feel so bad I want to cry, too.

Each day the sun would rise and set, the flag would be raised and lowered. Each Sunday I would have a date with my dead friend’s girl. I had no idea what I was doing or what I was going to do.

We can, if we so choose, wander aimlessly over the continent of the arbitrary. Rootless as some winged seed blown about on a serendipitous spring breeze.

Whether it's good for anything or not, cool or totally uncool, in the final analysis what's most important is what you can't see but can feel in your heart.

I closed my own jazz bar so I could be a man who can write novels as I like. I was pleased about that. This pleasure was connected to the pleasure of writing.

This place is too calm, too natural--too complete. I don't deserve it. At least not yet.

You can keep as quiet as you like, but one of these days somebody is going to find you.

Learning another language is like becoming another person.

Life is so uncertain: you never know what could happen. One way to deal with that is to keep your pajamas washed.