Top 500 Haruki Murakami Quotes (2024 Update)
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251. “Sometimes when I think of life, I feel like a piece of driftwood washed up on shore.”

— Haruki Murakami

252. “I’m often asked what I think about as I run. Usually the people who ask this have never run long distances themselves. I always ponder the question. What exactly do I think about when I’m running? I don’t have a clue.”

— Haruki Murakami

253. “I was feeling lonely without her, but the fact that I could feel lonely at all was consolation. Loneliness wasn’t such a bad feeling. It was like the stillness of the pin oak after the little birds had flown off.”

— Haruki Murakami

254. “No, I don’t want your money. The world moves less by money than by what you owe people and what they owe you. I don’t like to owe anybody anything, so I keep to myself as much on the lending side as I can.”

— Haruki Murakami

255. “It’s a dark, cool, quiet place. A basement in your soul. And that place can sometimes be dangerous to the human mind. I can open the door and enter that darkness, but I have to be very careful. I can find my story there. Then I bring that thing to the surface, into the real world.”

— Haruki Murakami

256. “Music has that power to revive memories, sometimes so intensely that they hurt.”

— Haruki Murakami

257. “I’ll write to you. A super-long letter, like in an old-fashioned novel.”

— Haruki Murakami

258. “Sometimes you’re just the sweetest thing. Like Christmas, summer vacation, and a brand-new puppy rolled into one.”

— Haruki Murakami

259. “Something in her small eyes caught the sunlight and glistened, like a glacier on the faraway face of a mountain.”

— Haruki Murakami

260. “Still, in the end, we all die just the same.”

— Haruki Murakami

261. “If I used being busy as an excuse not to run, I’d never run again. I have only a few reasons to keep on running, and a truckload of them to quit.”

— Haruki Murakami

262. “The sad truth is that certain types of things can’t go backward. Once they start going forward, no matter what you do, they can’t go back the way they were. If even one little thing goes awry, then that’s how it will stay forever.”

— Haruki Murakami

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

— Haruki Murakami

264. “Life doesn’t require ideals. It requires standards of action.”

— Haruki Murakami

265. “When I was little, I had this science book. There was a section on ‘What would happen to the world if there was no friction?’ Answer: ‘Everything on earth would fly into space from the centrifugal force of revolution.’ That was my mood.”

— Haruki Murakami

266. “What makes us most normal,” said Reiko, “is knowing that we’re not normal.”

— Haruki Murakami

267. “Nobody’s going to win all the time. On the highway of life you can’t always be in the fast lane.”

— Haruki Murakami

268. “What we seek is some kind of compensation for what we put up with.”

— Haruki Murakami

269. “Between the time the last train leaves and the first train arrives, the place changes: it’s not the same as in daytime.”

— Haruki Murakami

270. “How many Sundays – how many hundreds of Sundays like this – lay ahead of me? “Quiet, peaceful and lonely,” I said aloud to myself. On Sundays i didn’t wind my spring.”

— Haruki Murakami

271. “Her pubic hair grew like a patch of grass that had been trampled by a passing army.”

— Haruki Murakami

272. “Her cry was the saddest sound of orgasm that I had ever heard.”

— Haruki Murakami

273. “I dream. Sometimes I think that’s the only right thing to do. To dream, to live in the world of dreams. But it doesn’t last forever. Wakefulness always comes to take me back.”

— Haruki Murakami

274. “In other words, let’s face it: Life is basically unfair. But even in a situation that’s unfair, I think it’s possible to seek out a kind of fairness. Of course, that might take time and effort. And maybe it won’t seem to be worth all that. It’s up to each individual to decide whether or not it is.”

— Haruki Murakami

275. “They were each like a mirror for the other, reflecting the changes in themselves.”

— Haruki Murakami

276. “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

277. “I often dream about the Dolphin Hotel.”

— Haruki Murakami

278. “And everywhere, infinite options, infinite possibilities. An infinity, and at the same time, zero. We try to scoop it all up in our hands, and what we get is a handful of zero. That’s the city.”

— Haruki Murakami

279. “Nothing so consumes a person as meaningless exertion.”

— Haruki Murakami

280. “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.”

— Haruki Murakami

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

— Haruki Murakami

282. “Thinking about spaghetti that boils eternally but is never done is a sad, sad thing.”

— Haruki Murakami

283. “Genius or fool, you don’t live in the world alone. You can hide underground or you can build a wall around yourself, but somebody’s going to come along and screw up the works.”

— Haruki Murakami

284. “But metaphors help eliminate what separates you and me.”

— Haruki Murakami

285. “Listen up – there’s no war that will end all wars,’ Crow tells me. ‘War breeds war. Lapping up the blood shed by violence, feeding on wounded flesh. War is a perfect, self-contained being. You need to know that.”

— Haruki Murakami

286. “The Earth, time, concepts, love, life, faith justice, evil – they’re all fluid and in transition. They don’t stay in one form or in one place forever. The whole universe is like some big FedEx box.”

— Haruki Murakami

287. “Death leaves cans of shaving cream half-used.”

— Haruki Murakami

288. “Most runners run not because they want to live longer, but because they want to live life to the fullest.”

— Haruki Murakami

289. “We can, if we so choose, wander aimlessly over the continent of the arbitrary. Rootless as some winged seed blown about on a serendipitous spring breeze.”

— Haruki Murakami

290. “What’s nurtured slowly grows well.”

— Haruki Murakami

291. “In dreams you don’t need to make any distinctions between things. Not at all. Boundaries don’t exist. So in dreams there are hardly ever collisions. Even if there are, they don’t hurt. Reality is different. Reality bites. Reality, reality.”

— Haruki Murakami

292. “This person, this self, this me, finally, was made somewhere else. Everything had come from somewhere else, and it would all go somewhere else. I was nothing but a pathway for the person known as me.”

— Haruki Murakami

293. “Civilization is communication,” the doctor said. “That which is not expressed doesn’t exist.”

— Haruki Murakami

294. “Perhaps most people in the world aren’t trying to be free, Kafka. They just think they are. It’s all an illusion. If they really were set free, most people would be in a real pickle. You’d better remember that. People actually prefer not being free?”

— Haruki Murakami

295. “This is what it means to live on. When granted hope, a person uses it as fuel, as a guidepost to life. It is impossible to live without hope.”

— Haruki Murakami

296. “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

297. “When it’s all over, it’ll seem like a dream.”

— Haruki Murakami

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

— Haruki Murakami

299. “The death of a dream can be, in a way, sadder than that of a living being. Sometimes it all seems so unfair.”

— Haruki Murakami

300. “A person’s destiny is something you look back at afterwards, not something to be known in advance.”

— Haruki Murakami