Haruki Murakami Quotes

People with dark souls have nothing but dark dreams. People with really dark souls do nothing but dream.

A state of chronic powerlessness eats away at a person

[But] we accept irony through a device called metaphor. And through that we grow and become deeper human beings.

You have to wait until tomorrow to find out what tomorrow will bring.

Everything, everything seemed once-upon-a-time.

His heart, like mine, was ticking off the time allotted to his small restless body.

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

People are drawn deeper into tragedy not by their defects but by their virtues.

What we call the present is given shape by an accumulation of the past.

My biggest fault is that the faults I was born with grow bigger each year.

Love with complications. Scenery was the last thing on my mind.

Overhead, the two moons worked together to bathe the world in a strange light.

If you think about it, an unfair society is a society that makes it possible for you to exploit your abilities to the limit.

All of us are imperfect human beings living in an imperfect world.

Is this what it means to go back to square one? Most likely. He had nothing left to lose, other than his life.

When there's nothing to do, you do nothing slowly and intently.

Something inside me had dropped away, and nothing came in to fill the cavern.

Why do people have to build such depressing places? I'm not saying that every nook and cranny of the world has to be beautiful, but does it have to be this ugly?

Sometimes I feel like a caretaker of a museum -- a huge, empty museum where no one ever comes, and I'm watching over it for no one but myself.

So what’s wrong if there happens to be one guy in the world who enjoys trying to understand you?

I'll never see them again. I know that. And they know that. And knowing this, we say farewell.

Once a guy starts using a wig, he has to keep using one. It's, like, his fate. That's why wig makers make such huge profits. I hate to say it, but they're like drug dealers.

My heroes don't have anything special. They have something to tell other people but they don't know how, so they talk to themselves.

Writing is fun - at least mostly. I write for four hours every day. After that I go running. As a rule, 10 kilometers (6.2 miles). That's easy to manage.

Understanding is but the sum of misunderstandings.

What we needed were not words and promises but a steady accumulation of small realities.

Why do I act like this, agreeing when I really disagree, letting people force me to do things I don't want to do?

Living like an empty shell is not really living, no matter how many years it may go on. The heart and flesh of an empty shell give birth to nothing more than the life of an empty shell.

A person's last moments are an important thing. You can't choose how you're born but you can choose how you die.

Wherever there's hope there's a trial.

Taking crazy things seriously is a serious waste of time.

She gave me this look – she might have been watching from a lifeboat as the ship went down. Or maybe it was the other way around.

In the end, like so many beautiful promises in our lives, that dinner date never came to be.

Sometimes, however, this sense of isolation, like acid spilling out of a bottle, can unconsciously eat away at a person’s heart and dissolve it.

I write weird stories. I don't know why I like weirdness so much ... 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.

Some things are forgotten, some things disappear, some things die.

The little things are important, Mr. Wind-Up Bird.

It doesn’t matter how old I get, but as long as I continue to live I’ll always discover something new about myself.

Don't pointless things have a place, too, in this far-from-perfect world?

In my younger days, I was trying to write sophisticated prose and fantastic stories.

Once you let yourself grow close to someone, cutting the ties could be painful.

I may not be the most likable person in the world, but I try not to upset people.

A theory is a battlefield in your head.

Music always stimulates my imagination. When I'm writing I usually have some Baroque music on low in the background chamber music by Bach, Telemann, and the like.

No matter what form the relationship might take, he was the only person she could picture sharing her life with.

Whether in music or in fiction, the most basic thing is rhythm. Your style needs to have good, natural, steady rhythm, or people won't keep reading your work.

Better to be a first-class matchbox than a second-class match.

The pillow smells like the sunlight, a precious smell.

This is the extent of his knowledge of the sea: it was very big, it was salty, and fish lived there.

It's all matter of attitude. You could let a lot of things bother you if you wanted to But it's pretty much the same anywhere you go, you can manage.