Murakami Quotes

The rain that fell on the city runs down the dark gutters and empties into the sea without even soaking the ground

The others in the dorm thought I wanted to be a writer, because I was always alone with a book, but I had no such ambition. There was nothing I wanted to be.

It is very simple, actually. It is because you and Tengo were so powerfully drawn to each other.

No matter what the situation may be, I still take pleasure in witnessing the joy of others.

That's gotta be one of the principles behind reality. Accepting things that are hard to comprehend, and leaving them that way.

I lost some of my friends because I got so famous, people who just assumed that I would be different now. I felt like everyone hated me. That is the most unhappy time of my life.

I didn't read so much Japanese literature. Because my father was a teacher of Japanese literature, I just wanted to do something else.

You are 27 or 28 right? It is very tough to live at that age. When nothing is sure. I have sympathy with you.

Among the many values in life, I appreciate freedom most.

What if I’ve forgotten the most important thing?

All right, then, I thought: here I am in the bottom of a well.

And her sleep was too long and deep for that:so deep that she left her normal reality behind.

But the silence spoke volumes.

My shadow is only half of what it should be." "Everyone has their shortcomings.

Once thing goes wrong, then the whole house of cards collapses. And there's no way you can extricate yourself. Until someone comes along to drag you out.

If you want to talk about something new, you have to make up a new kind of language.

Love and used Subarus were two different things. Weren't they?

The best way to think about reality, I had decided, was to get as far away from it as possible.

Maybe she thought the garbage and rocks in your head were interesting. But finally, garbage is garbage and rocks are rocks.

As with marathon runs and lengths of toilet paper, there had to be standards to measure up to.

But if something did happen, it happened. Whether it's right or wrong. I accept everything that happens, and that's how I became the person I am now.

I realize full well how hard it must be to go on living alone in a place from which someone has left you, but there is nothing so cruel in this world as the desolation of having nothing to hope for.

Pointless thinking is worse than no thinking at all.

We all die and disappear, but that's because the mechanism of the world itself is built on destruction and loss.

Most human activities are predicated on the assumption that life goes on. If you take that premise away, what is there left?

Not everything was lost in the flow of time

As I already explaned, I don't have any form. I'm a conceptual metaphysical object.

I dream. Sometimes I think that’s the only right thing to do. To dream, to live in the world of dreams. But it doesn’t last forever. Wakefulness always comes to take me back.

Lots of different ways to live and lots of different ways to die. But in the end that doesn't make a bit of difference. All that remains is a desert.

When the fire goes out, you'll start feeling the cold. You'll wake up whether you want to or not.

I realize now that the reality of things is not something you convey to people but something you make.

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.

What was lost was lost. There was no retrieving it, however you schemed, no returning to how things were, no going back.

The ground we stand on looks solid enough, but if something happens it can drop right out from under you.

To keep on going, you have to keep up the rhythm.

One impossible day, of an impossible month, of an impossible year.

I didn't feel like I was in my own body; my body was just a lonely, temporary container I happened to be borrowing.

If you listen to the radio for a whole hour there's maybe one decent song. The rest is mass-produced garbage

Properly speaking, should any individual ever have exact, clear knowledge of his own core consciousness?" "I wouldn't know," I said. "Nor would we," said the scientists.

Everyone may be ordinary, but they're not normal.

If they invent a car that runs on stupid jokes, you could go far.

Mediocrity's like a spot on a shirt—it never comes off.

An empty shell. Those were the first words that sprang to mind. .... Something incredibly important - .. - had disappeared from Miu for good. Leaving behind not life, but its absence

Time is too conceptual. Not that it stops us from filling it in. So much so, we can't even tell whether our experiences belong to time or to the world of physical things.

Painful is the stress when one cannot reproduce or convey vividly to others, however hard he tries, what he's experienced so intensely.

Is it against the law for me to know it?

In traveling, a companion, in life, compassion.

It depends on which reality you take and which reality I take.” (p. 318).

This may be the most important proposition revealed by history: At the time, no one knew what was coming.

It seems to me, though, that you always understand very well what I can't say very well. Trouble is I end up being even worse at saying things well.