Top 500 Haruki Murakami Quotes (2024 Update)
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451. “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

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

— Haruki Murakami

453. “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

454. “You slowly but surely become a has-been.”

— Haruki Murakami

455. “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

456. “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

457. “Our life here was just a momentary illusion, and someday reality would yank us back to the world we came from.”

— Haruki Murakami

458. “Pain is invisible, and known only to the sufferer.”

— Haruki Murakami

459. “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

460. “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

461. “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

462. “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

463. “What I’d like to be is a unique writer who’s different from everybody else. I want to be a writer who tells stories unlike other writers’.”

— Haruki Murakami

464. “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

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

— Haruki Murakami

466. “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

467. “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

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

— Haruki Murakami

469. “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

470. “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

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

— Haruki Murakami

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

— Haruki Murakami

473. “Once you start lying to the public, you have to keep lying. It never ends.”

— Haruki Murakami

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

— Haruki Murakami

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

— Haruki Murakami

476. “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

477. “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

478. “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

479. “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

480. “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

481. “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

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

— Haruki Murakami

483. “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

484. “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

485. “Running day after day, piling up the races, bit by bit I raise the bar, and by clearing each level I elevate myself.”

— Haruki Murakami

486. “Do you think you weren’t loved enough?” She tilted her head and looked at me. Then she gave a sharp, little nod. “Somewhere between ‘not enough’ and ‘not at all.’ I was always hungry for love. Just once, I wanted to know what it was like to get my fill of it – to be fed so much love I couldn’t take any more. Just once. But they never gave that to me. Never, not once.”

— Haruki Murakami

487. “But as Nietzsche said, ‘The gods furl their flags at boredom.”

— Haruki Murakami

488. “There were two moons in the sky – a small moon and a large one. They were floating there side by side. The large one was the usual moon that she had always seen. It was nearly full, and yellow. But there was another moon right next to it. It had an unfamiliar shape. It was somewhat lopsided, and greenish, as though thinly covered with moss.”

— Haruki Murakami

489. “Sex is an extremely subtle undertaking, unlike going to the department store on a Sunday to buy a thermos.”

— Haruki Murakami

490. “But what I think is, no matter how much suffering you went through, you never wanted to let go of those memories.” “That’s true,” Miss Saeki said. “It hurt more and more to hold on to them, but I never wanted to let them go, as long as I was alive. It was the only reason I had to go on living, the only thing that proved I was alive.” Nakata.”

— Haruki Murakami

491. “The human heart is like a night bird. Silently waiting for something, and when the time comes, it flies straight toward it.”

— Haruki Murakami

492. “Like flowers scattered in a storm, a man’s life is a long farewell.”

— Haruki Murakami

493. “How can those who live in the light of day possibly comprehend the depths of night?”

— Haruki Murakami

494. “Gazing at the rain, I consider what it means to belong, to become part of something. To have someone cry for me.”

— Haruki Murakami

495. “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.”

— Haruki Murakami

496. “I closed my eyes and tried to sleep. But it was not until much later that I was able to get any real sleep. In a place far away from anyone or anywhere, I drifted off for a moment.”

— Haruki Murakami

497. “This was something sure to be crammed full of warm secrets, like an antique clock built when peace filled the world.”

— Haruki Murakami

498. “For a long time, she held a special place in my heart. I kept this special place just for her, like a “Reserved” sign on a quiet corner table in a restaurant. Despite the fact that I was sure I’d never see her again.”

— Haruki Murakami

499. “If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking. That’s the world of hicks and slobs. Real people would be ashamed of themselves doing that. Haven’t you noticed, Watanabe? You and I are the only real ones in the dorm. The other guys are crap.”

— Haruki Murakami

500. “But the moon remained silent; it told no stories. All it did was embrace the heavy past with cool, measured detachment. On the moon there was neither air nor wind. Its vacuum was perfect for preserving memories unscathed. No one could unlock the heart of the moon.”

— Haruki Murakami