Top 500 Haruki Murakami Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “Chance encounters are what keep us going.”

— Haruki Murakami

52. “Why do people have to be this lonely? What’s the point of it all? Millions of people in this world, all of them yearning, looking to others to satisfy them, yet isolating themselves. Why? Was the earth put here just to nourish human loneliness?”

— Haruki Murakami

53. “Distance might not solve anything, no matter how far you run.”

— Haruki Murakami

54. “I’m not human. I’m a piece of machinery. I don’t need to feel a thing. Just forge on ahead.”

— Haruki Murakami

55. “You can keep as quiet as you like, but one of these days somebody is going to find you.”

— Haruki Murakami

56. “I never made any plan before writing, however I succeeded. I enjoyed writing with excitement ,“what happen on the next page?””

— Haruki Murakami

57. “If I have left a wound inside you, it is not just your wound but mine as well.”

— Haruki Murakami

58. “But I didn’t understand then. That I could hurt somebody so badly she would never recover. That a person can, just by living, damage another human being beyond repair.”

— Haruki Murakami

59. “Only the Dead stay seventeen forever.”

— Haruki Murakami

60. “Love can rebuild the world, they say, so everything’s possible when it comes to love.”

— Haruki Murakami

61. “There’s no such thing as perfect writing, just like there’s no such thing as perfect despair.”

— Haruki Murakami

62. “Ordinary imperfect people, always choose similarly imperfect people as friends.”

— Haruki Murakami

63. “Dreams come from the past, not from the future. Dreams shouldn’t control you – you should control them.”

— Haruki Murakami

64. “That’s all I think about these days. Must be because I have so much time to kill every day. When you don’t have anything to do, your thoughts get really, really far out-so far out you can’t follow them all the way to the end.”

— Haruki Murakami

65. “Time flows in strange ways on Sundays, and sights become mysteriously distorted.”

— Haruki Murakami

66. “Does G get angry because it follows F in the alphabet? Does page 68 in a book start a revolution because it follows 67?”

— Haruki Murakami

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

— Haruki Murakami

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

— Haruki Murakami

69. “I said nothing for a time, just ran my fingertips along the edge of the human-shaped emptiness that had been left inside me.”

— Haruki Murakami

70. “Sometimes fate is like a small sandstorm that keeps changing directions. You change direction but the sandstorm chases you. You turn again, but the storm adjusts.”

— Haruki Murakami

71. “I think history is collective memories. In writing, I’m using my own memory, and I’m using my collective memory.”

— Haruki Murakami

72. “Everybody has to start somewhere. You have your whole future ahead of you. Perfection doesn’t happen right away.”

— Haruki Murakami

73. “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.”

— Haruki Murakami

74. “Huge organizations and me don’t get along. They’re too inflexible, waste too much time, and have too many stupid people.”

— Haruki Murakami

75. “Writing a long novel is like survival training. Physical strength is as necessary as artistic sensitivity.”

— Haruki Murakami

76. “A friend to kill time is a friend sublime.”

— Haruki Murakami

77. “Not just beautiful, though – the stars are like the trees in the forest, alive and breathing. And they’re watching me.”

— Haruki Murakami

78. “Running taught me to have faith in my skills as a writer. I learned how much I can demand of myself, when I need a break, and when the break starts to get too long. I known how hard I am allowed to push myself.”

— Haruki Murakami

79. “Time, of course, topples everyone in its path equally- the way that driver beats his old horse until it dies. But the thrashing we receive is one of frightful gentleness. Few of us even realize that we are being beaten.”

— Haruki Murakami

80. “It’s just like Yeats said. In dreams begin responsibilities. Flip this around and you could say that where there’s no power to imagine, no responsibility can arise.”

— Haruki Murakami

81. “She’s letting out her feelings. The scary thing is not being able to do that. When your feelings build up and harden and die inside, then you’re in big trouble.”

— Haruki Murakami

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

— Haruki Murakami

83. “Losing you is most difficult for me, but the nature of my love for you is what matters. If it distorts into half-truth, then perhaps it is better not to love you. I must keep my mind but loose you.”

— Haruki Murakami

84. “I feel like I’ve swallowed a cloudy sky.”

— Haruki Murakami

85. “Memories and thoughts age, just as people do. But certain thoughts can never age, and certain memories can never fade.”

— Haruki Murakami

86. “All imperfections are forced upon the imperfect, so the ‘perfect’ can live content and oblivious.”

— Haruki Murakami

87. “We knew exactly what we wanted in each other. And even so, it ended. One day it stopped, as if the film simply slipped off the reel.”

— Haruki Murakami

88. “I don’t know, there’s something about you. Say there’s an hourglass: the sand’s about to run out. Someone like you can always be counted on to turn the thing over.”

— Haruki Murakami

89. “There weren’t any curtains in the windows, and the books that didn’t fit into the bookshelf lay piled on the floor like a bunch of intellectual refugees.”

— Haruki Murakami

90. “As long as I kept my body moving I could forget about the emptiness inside.”

— Haruki Murakami

91. “I get up early in the morning, 4 o’clock, and I sit at my desk and what I do is just dream. After three or four hours, that’s enough. In the afternoon, I run.”

— Haruki Murakami

92. “Open your eyes, train your ears, use your head. If a mind you have, then use it while you can.”

— Haruki Murakami

93. “People lose fifty million skin cells every day. The cells get scraped off and turn into invisible dust, and disappear into the air. Maybe we are nothing but skin cells as far as the world is concerned.”

— Haruki Murakami

94. “With great knowledge comes great responsibility.”

— Haruki Murakami

95. “What I feel for her is a wholly different emotion. It stands and walks on its own, living and breathing and throbbing and shaking me to the roots of my being.”

— Haruki Murakami

96. “If I stayed here, something inside me would be lost forever – something I couldn’t afford to lose. It was like a vague dream, a burning, unfulfilled desire. The kind of dream people have only when they’re seventeen.”

— Haruki Murakami

97. “Exhaustion pays no mind to age or beauty. Like rain and earthquakes and hail and floods.”

— Haruki Murakami

98. “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.”

— Haruki Murakami

99. “Some things, you know, if you say them, it makes them not true?”

— Haruki Murakami

100. “I am worrying about my country. I feel I have a responsibility as a novelist to do something.”

— Haruki Murakami