Top 500 Haruki Murakami Quotes (2024 Update)
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251. “Waiting for your answer is one of the most painful things I have ever been through. At least let me know whether or not I hurt you.”

— Haruki Murakami

252. “The sky grew darker, painted blue on blue, one stroke at a time, into deeper and deeper shades of night.”

— Haruki Murakami

253. “Life is so uncertain: you never know what could happen. One way to deal with that is to keep your pajamas washed.”

— Haruki Murakami

254. “Not that running away’s going to solve everything. I don’t want to rain on your parade or anything, but I wouldn’t count on escaping this place if I were you. No matter how far you run. Distance might not solve anything.”

— Haruki Murakami

255. “Until the bitter end, the emptiness inside her was hers alone.”

— Haruki Murakami

256. “Despite your best efforts, people are going to be hurt when it’s time for them to be hurt.”

— Haruki Murakami

257. “But if you knew you might not be able to see it again tomorrow, everything would suddenly become special and precious, wouldn’t it?”

— Haruki Murakami

258. “I happen to like the strange ones. People who look normal and leads normal lives – they’re the ones you have to watch out for.”

— Haruki Murakami

259. “Sometimes when I think of life, I feel like a piece of driftwood washed up on shore.”

— Haruki Murakami

260. “While they’re still alive, people can become ghosts.”

— Haruki Murakami

261. “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

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

— Haruki Murakami

263. “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

264. “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

265. “I used to think the years would go by in order, that you get older one year at a time. But it’s not like that. It happens overnight.”

— Haruki Murakami

266. “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

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

— Haruki Murakami

268. “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

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

— Haruki Murakami

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

— Haruki Murakami

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

— Haruki Murakami

272. “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

273. “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

274. “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

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

— Haruki Murakami

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

— Haruki Murakami

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

— Haruki Murakami

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

— Haruki Murakami

279. “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

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

— Haruki Murakami

281. “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

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

— Haruki Murakami

283. “Even if you managed to escape from one cage, weren’t you just in another, larger one?”

— Haruki Murakami

284. “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

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

— Haruki Murakami

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

— Haruki Murakami

287. “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

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

— Haruki Murakami

289. “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

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

— Haruki Murakami

291. “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

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

— Haruki Murakami

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

— Haruki Murakami

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

— Haruki Murakami

295. “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

296. “But we cannot simply sit and stare at our wounds forever.”

— Haruki Murakami

297. “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

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

— Haruki Murakami

299. “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

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

— Haruki Murakami