Top 500 Haruki Murakami Quotes (2025 Update)
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201. “Never let the darkness or negativity outside affect your inner self. Just wait until morning comes and the bright light will drown out the darkness.”

— Haruki Murakami

202. “Life is like a box of cookies.”

— Haruki Murakami

203. “Whenever I look at the ocean, I always want to talk to people, but when I’m talking to people, I always want to look at the ocean.”

— Haruki Murakami

204. “No matter how much time passes, no matter what takes place in the interim, there are some things we can never assign to oblivion, memories we can never rub away.”

— Haruki Murakami

205. “I like to read books. I like to listen to music.”

— Haruki Murakami

206. “In a sense, I’m the one who ruined me: I did it myself.”

— Haruki Murakami

207. “Friends don’t need the intervention of a third party. Friendship’s a voluntary thing.”

— Haruki Murakami

208. “As we go through life we gradually discover who we are, but the more we discover, the more we lose ourselves.”

— Haruki Murakami

209. “In a place far away from anyone or anywhere, I drifted off for a moment.”

— Haruki Murakami

210. “I’m a coward when it comes to matters of the heart. That is my fatal flaw.”

— Haruki Murakami

211. “I’m not so weird to me.”

— Haruki Murakami

212. “Only where there is disillusionment and depression and sorrow does happiness arise; without the despair of loss, there is no hope.”

— Haruki Murakami

213. “Life’s no piece of cake, mind you, but the recipe’s my own to fool with.”

— Haruki Murakami

214. “The moon had been observing the earth close-up longer than anyone. It must have witnessed all of the phenomena occurring – and all of the acts carried out – on this earth. But the moon remained silent; it told no stories.”

— Haruki Murakami

215. “When you are used to the kind of life -of never getting anything you want- you stop knowing what it is you want.”

— Haruki Murakami

216. “A person learns how to love himself through the simple acts of loving and being loved by someone else.”

— Haruki Murakami

217. “There is some risk, of course. But risk is the spice of life.”

— Haruki Murakami

218. “Like you’re riding a train at night across some vast plain, and you catch a glimpse of a tiny light in a window of a farmhouse. In an instant it’s sucked back into the darkness behind and vanishes. But if you close your eyes, that point of light stays with you, just barely for a few moments.”

— Haruki Murakami

219. “I wonder what ants do on rainy days?”

— Haruki Murakami

220. “You’ve already decided what you’re going to do, and all that’s left is to set the wheels in motion. I mean, it’s your life. Basically, you gotta go with what you think is right.”

— Haruki Murakami

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

— Haruki Murakami

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

— Haruki Murakami

223. “The thoughts that occur to me while I’m running are like clouds in the sky. Clouds of all different sizes. They come and they go, while the sky remains the same sky always. The clouds are mere guests in the sky that pass away and vanish, leaving behind the sky.”

— Haruki Murakami

224. “The fresh smell of coffee soon wafted through the apartment, the smell that separates night from day.”

— Haruki Murakami

225. “Whether in music or in fiction, the most basic thing is rhythm. Your style needs to have good, natural, steady rhythm, or people won’t keep reading your work.”

— Haruki Murakami

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

— Haruki Murakami

227. “I’m just kinda tired. Like a monkey in the rain.”

— Haruki Murakami

228. “No truth can cure the sorrow we feel from losing a loved one. No truth, no sincerity, no strength, no kindness can cure that sorrow. All we can do is see it through to the end and learn something from it, but what we learn will be no help in facing the next sorrow that comes to us without warning.”

— Haruki Murakami

229. “It’s pretty thin, the wall separating healthy confidence and unhealthy Pride.”

— Haruki Murakami

230. “Loneliness becomes an acid that eats away at you.”

— Haruki Murakami

231. “An unhealthy soul requires a healthy body.”

— Haruki Murakami

232. “I probably still haven’t completely adapted to the world. I don’t know, I feel like this isn’t the real world. The people, the scene: they just don’t seem real to me.”

— Haruki Murakami

233. “Pointless thinking is worse than no thinking at all.”

— Haruki Murakami

234. “Besides being the world the kind of sadness that can not be expressed in tears. You can not explain it to anyone. Unable to take any shape, settles quietly in the bottom of the heart as snow during the windless night.”

— Haruki Murakami

235. “Things pass us by. Nobody can catch them. That’s the way we live our lives.”

— Haruki Murakami

236. “My point is: in this whole wide world the only person you can depend on is you.”

— Haruki Murakami

237. “Killing time is not an easy job.”

— Haruki Murakami

238. “Two-thirds of earth’s surface is ocean, and all we can see with the naked eye is the surface.”

— Haruki Murakami

239. “I have no models in Japanese literature. I created my own style, my own way.”

— Haruki Murakami

240. “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.”

— Haruki Murakami

241. “Lost opportunities, lost possibilities, feelings we can never get back. That’s part of what it means to be alive. But inside our heads – at least that’s where I imagine it – there’s a little room where we store those memories. A room like the stacks in this library. And to understand the workings of our own heart we have to keep on making new reference cards. We have to dust things off every once in awhile, let in fresh air, change the water in the flower vases. In other words, you’ll live forever in your own private library.”

— Haruki Murakami

242. “We all have ordeals we must face,” Menshiki said. “It’s through them that we find a new direction in our lives. The more grueling the ordeal, the more it can help us down the road.”

— Haruki Murakami

243. “Everything, everything seemed once-upon-a-time.”

— Haruki Murakami

244. “Our responsibility begins with our imagination.”

— Haruki Murakami

245. “I write my novels personally, desperately and non-negligently. When I write my novels, I think about my novels only, and never do other works.”

— Haruki Murakami

246. “I am struck by how, except when you’re young, you really need to prioritize in life, figuring out in what order you should divide up your time and energy. If you don’t get that sort of system set by a certain age, you’ll lack focus and your life will be out of balance.”

— Haruki Murakami

247. “Most of what I know about writing I’ve learned through running every day.”

— Haruki Murakami

248. “Ask whatever questions you want, but remember, I may not answer.”

— Haruki Murakami

249. “How much do you love me?? Midori asked. ‘Enough to melt all the tigers in the world to butter,’ I said.”

— Haruki Murakami

250. “Whiskey, like a beautiful woman, demands appreciation. You gaze first, then it’s time to drink.”

— Haruki Murakami