Top 500 Haruki Murakami Quotes (2025 Update)
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451. “I wondered if she was trying to convey something to me, something she could not put into words – something prior to words that she could not grasp within herself and which therefore had no hope of ever turning into words.”

— Haruki Murakami

452. “I wasn’t particularly afraid of death itself. As Shakespeare said, die this year and you don’t have to die the next.”

— Haruki Murakami

453. “Exerting yourself to the fullest within your individual limits: that’s the essence of running, and a metaphor for life – and for me, for writing as well. I believe many runners would agree.”

— Haruki Murakami

454. “The faintest gleam of their lost memories glimmered for the briefest moment in their hearts.”

— Haruki Murakami

455. “The problem was, I think, that the places I fit in were always falling behind the rimes.”

— Haruki Murakami

456. “Relax your body, and the rest of you will lighten up.”

— Haruki Murakami

457. “There are some things in this world that can be done over, and some that can’t. And time passing is one thing that can’t be redone. Come this far, and you can’t go back.”

— Haruki Murakami

458. “I was impressed by the variety of dreams and goals that life could offer.”

— Haruki Murakami

459. “The good thing about writing book is that you can dream while you are awake...”

— Haruki Murakami

460. “Because I have no sense of self. I have no personality, no brilliant color. I have nothing to offer. That’s always been my problem. I feel like an empty vessel. I have a shape, I guess, as a container, but there’s nothing inside. I just can’t see myself as the right person for her. I think that the more time passes, and the more she knows about me, the more disappointed Sara will be, and the more she’ll choose to distance herself from me.”

— Haruki Murakami

461. “It’s not me but the world that’s deranged.”

— Haruki Murakami

462. “When I am writing, I do not distinguish between the natural and supernatural. Everything seems real. That is my world, you could say.”

— Haruki Murakami

463. “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.”

— Haruki Murakami

464. “He placed this doubt inside a drawer in his mind labeled “Pending” and postponed any further consideration. He had many such drawers inside him, with numerous doubts and questions tucked away.”

— Haruki Murakami

465. “When I was a teenager, I thought how great it would be if only I could write novels in English. I had the feeling that I would be able to express my emotions so much more directly than if I wrote in Japanese.”

— Haruki Murakami

466. “We each have a special something we can get only at a special time of our life. like a small flame. A careful, fortunate few cherish that flame, nurture it, hold it as a torch to light their way. But once that flame goes out, it’s gone forever.”

— Haruki Murakami

467. “My priority is my books, at least at this point. What I have to do is write the narrative of this time.”

— Haruki Murakami

468. “I have a lot more patience for others than I have for myself, and I am much better at bringing out the best in others than in myself. That’s just the kind of person I am. I’m the scratchy stuff on the side of the matchbox.”

— Haruki Murakami

469. “Accurate knowledge does not improve people’s lives. The objective does not necessarily surpass the subjective, you know. Reality does not necessarily extinguish fantasy... There are channels through which reality can become unreal, or unreality can enter the realm of the real. If we desire it that strongly. Deep in our heart. But that didn’t mean we were free. It might demonstrate quite the opposite.”

— Haruki Murakami

470. “For me, writing a novel is like having a dream. Writing a novel lets me intentionally dream while I’m still awake. I can continue yesterday’s dream today, something you can’t normally do in everyday life.”

— Haruki Murakami

471. “The new day is almost here, but the old one is still dragging its heavy skirts. Just as ocean water and river water struggle against each other at a river mouth, the old time and the new time clash and blend.”

— Haruki Murakami

472. “Because brains packed with knowledge are yummy, that’s why. They’re nice and creamy. And sort of grainy at the same time.”

— Haruki Murakami

473. “Something will work out tomorrow, I thought. And if not, then tomorrow I’ll do some thinking. Ob – la-di, ob-la-da, life goes on.”

— Haruki Murakami

474. “It is the same with anything – you have to learn through your own experience, paying your own way. You can’t learn it from a book.”

— Haruki Murakami

475. “Maybe the only thing I can definitely say about is this: That’s life. Maybe the only thing we can do is accept it, without really knowing what’s going on.”

— Haruki Murakami

476. “En la vida de los hombres hay un punto a partir del cual ya no podemos retroceder. Y, en algunos casos, existe otro a partir del cual ya no podemos seguir avanzando.”

— Haruki Murakami

477. “All you have to do is wait,” I explained. “Sit tight and wait for the right moment. Not try to change anything by force, just watch the drift of things. Make an effort to cast a fair eye on everything. If you do that, you just naturally know what to do. But everyone’s always too busy. They’re too talented, their schedules are too full. They’re too interested in themselves to think about what’s fair.”

— Haruki Murakami

478. “It’s like I’d been born with a blind spot, and was always missing something. And what I missed was always the most important thing of all.”

— Haruki Murakami

479. “We’re all wrong, every one of us.”

— Haruki Murakami

480. “She was seriously in love, but she never made demands.”

— Haruki Murakami

481. “I don’t know much about the world, but I do know one thing for sure. If I’m pessimistic, then the adults in this world who are not pessimistic are a bunch of idiots.”

— Haruki Murakami

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

— Haruki Murakami

483. “If I choose to write about sheep, it’s just because I happened to write about sheep. There is no deep significance.”

— Haruki Murakami

484. “Love and used Subarus were two different things. Weren’t they?”

— Haruki Murakami

485. “To be able to grasp something of value, sometimes you have to perform seemingly inefficient acts.”

— Haruki Murakami

486. “If talent’s the foundation you rely on, and yet it’s so unreliable that you have no idea what’s going to happen to it the next minute, what meaning does it have?”

— Haruki Murakami

487. “There’s nothing left here. Not one thing left for you.”

— Haruki Murakami

488. “Irrepressible curiosity vied with an instinctive fear.”

— Haruki Murakami

489. “In the same way that people stare up at the sky to see the moon every night, yet understand next to nothing about it.”

— Haruki Murakami

490. “I think of myself as more the non-turn-on type. so when I do get turned on, I don’t trust it, I have to investigate the source.”

— Haruki Murakami

491. “Tsukuru Tazaki had nowhere he had to go. This was like a running theme of his life. He had no place he had to go to, no place to come back to. He never did, and he didn’t now. The only place for him was where he was now.”

— Haruki Murakami

492. “Maybe so, but I’m not just looking up at the sky and waiting for the fruit to drop. In my own way, I’m working hard. I’m working ten times harder than you are.”

— Haruki Murakami

493. “She only felt revulsion for any kind if religious fundamentalists. The very thought if such people’s intolerant worldview, their inflated sense of their own superiority, and thei callous imposition of their own beliefs on others was enough to fill her with rage.”

— Haruki Murakami

494. “When I should have felt real pain, I stifled it. I didn’t want to take it on, so I avoided facing up to it. Which is why my heart is so empty now.”

— Haruki Murakami

495. “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.”

— Haruki Murakami

496. “If you want everything to be nice and straight all the time, then go live in a world made with a triungular ruler.”

— Haruki Murakami

497. “I’ve had that kind of experience myself: I’m looking at a map and I see someplace that makes me think, ‘I absolutely have to go to this place, no matter what’. And most of the time, for some reason, the place is far away and hard to get to. I feel this overwhelming desire to know what kind of scenery the place has, or what people are doing there. It’s like measles – you can’t show other people exactly where the passion comes from. It’s curiosity in the purest sense. An inexplicable inspiration.”

— Haruki Murakami

498. “No, I don’t have the slightest desire to rewrite the past or history or whatever. What I’d like to rewrite is the present, here and now.”

— Haruki Murakami

499. “I’ve always enjoyed this time, early in the morning, gazing intently at a pure white canvas. “Canvas Zen” is my term for it. Nothing is painted there yet, but it’s more than a simple blank space. Hidden on that white canvas is what must eventually emerge. As I look more closely, I discover various possibilities, which congeal into a perfect clue as to how to proceed. That’s the moment I really enjoy. The moment when existence and nonexistence coalesce.”

— Haruki Murakami

500. “I wrote my first two long novels and an anthology of short narratives, when I was a manager of my own jazz bar. There was not enough time to write and I didn’t know how to write novels. Therefore, I made written collages of aphorisms and rags.”

— Haruki Murakami