Murakami Quotes

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

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

The grounds of the place were dominated by several large, old willow trees that towered over the surrounding stone wall and swayed soundlessly in the wind like lost souls.

Don't you think it would be wonderful to get rid of everything and everybody and just go some place where you don't know a soul?

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.

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

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

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?

I’ve built a wall around me, never letting anybody inside and trying not to venture outside myself

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

Maybe the star doesnt even exist any more.Yet sometimes that light seems more real to me than anything.

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.

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.

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

Crying is personal. On the other hand, laughing is more general . Laughing makes our hearts wider.

Understanding is but the sum of misunderstandings.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

Don't pointless things have a place, too, in this far-from-perfect world? Remove everything pointless from an imperfect life, and it'd lose even its imperfection.

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

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

A story is not something of this world. A real story requires a kind of magical baptism to link the world on this side with the world on the other side.

I'm a very ordinary human being; I just happen to like reading books.

This is no honky-tonk parade. 1Q84 is the real world, where a cut draws real blood, where pain is real pain and fear is real fear. The moon in the sky is no paper moon.

Is it possible to become friends with a butterfly?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Taking crazy things seriously is a serious waste of time.

Wherever there's hope there's a trial.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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