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

— Haruki Murakami

252. “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

253. “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

254. “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

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

— Haruki Murakami

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

— Haruki Murakami

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

— Haruki Murakami

258. “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

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

— Haruki Murakami

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

— Haruki Murakami

261. “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

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

— Haruki Murakami

263. “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

264. “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

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

— Haruki Murakami

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

— Haruki Murakami

267. “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

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

— Haruki Murakami

269. “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

270. “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

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

— Haruki Murakami

272. “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

273. “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

274. “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

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

— Haruki Murakami

276. “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

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

— Haruki Murakami

278. “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

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

— Haruki Murakami

280. “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

281. “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

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

— Haruki Murakami

283. “So I made up my mind I was going to find someone who would love me unconditionally three hundred and sixty-five days a year. Watanabe: Wow, and did your search pay off? M: That’s the hard part. I guess I’ve been waiting so long I’m looking for perfection. That makes it tough.”

— Haruki Murakami

284. “He does not exist here, with me, but flesh that does not exist will never die, and promises unmade are never broken.”

— Haruki Murakami

285. “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

286. “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

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

— Haruki Murakami

288. “Some things are forgotten, some things disappear, some things die.”

— Haruki Murakami

289. “Death was not the opposite of life. It was already here, within my being, it had always been here, and no struggle would permit me to forget that.”

— Haruki Murakami

290. “In the spring of her twenty-second year, Sumire fell in love for the first time in her life.”

— Haruki Murakami

291. “To be able to talk to your heart’s content about a book you like with someone who feels the same way about it is one of the greatest joys that life can offer.”

— Haruki Murakami

292. “Writers have to keep on writing if they want to mature, like caterpillars endlessly chewing on leaves.”

— Haruki Murakami

293. “There’s an essential order you have to follow in everything. It’s a way of showing respect, following everything in the correct order.”

— Haruki Murakami

294. “I began running on an everyday basis after I became a writer. As being a writer requires sitting at a desk for hours a day, without getting some exercise you’d quickly get out of shape and gain weight, I figured.”

— Haruki Murakami

295. “I started writing at the kitchen table after midnight. It took ten months to finish that first book; I sent it to a publisher and I got some kind of prize, so it was like a dream – I was surprised to find it happening.”

— Haruki Murakami

296. “Have books ‘happened’ to you? Unless your answer to that question is ‘yes,’ I’m unsure how to talk to you.”

— Haruki Murakami

297. “I didn’t have much to say to anybody but kept to myself and my books. With my eyes closed, I would touch a familiar book and draw it’s fragrance deep inside me. This was enough to make me happy.”

— Haruki Murakami

298. “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

299. “Writing talent is similar to the art of chatting up a girl. You can improve to a certain degree through practice, but basically you are either born with it or you aren’t.”

— Haruki Murakami

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

— Haruki Murakami