Top 500 Haruki Murakami Quotes (2026 Update)
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251. “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

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

— Haruki Murakami

253. “Our responsibility begins with our imagination.”

— Haruki Murakami

254. “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

255. “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

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

— Haruki Murakami

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

— Haruki Murakami

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

— Haruki Murakami

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

— Haruki Murakami

260. “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

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

— Haruki Murakami

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

— Haruki Murakami

263. “This is the extent of his knowledge of the sea: it was very big, it was salty, and fish lived there.”

— Haruki Murakami

264. “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

265. “Your life’s just begun and there’s a ton of things out in the world you’ve never laid eyes on. Things you never could imagine.”

— Haruki Murakami

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

— Haruki Murakami

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

— Haruki Murakami

268. “Don’t let thoughts of me hold you back. Just do what you want to do. Otherwise, I might end up taking you with me, and that is the one thing I don’t want to do. I don’t want to interfere with your life.”

— Haruki Murakami

269. “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

270. “From a distance, most things look beautiful.”

— Haruki Murakami

271. “There is nothing so cruel in this world as the desolation of having nothing to hope for.”

— Haruki Murakami

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

— Haruki Murakami

273. “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

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

— Haruki Murakami

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

— Haruki Murakami

276. “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

277. “I’d be smiling and chatting away, and my mind would be floating around somewhere else, like a balloon with a broken string.”

— Haruki Murakami

278. “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

279. “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

280. “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

281. “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

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

— Haruki Murakami

283. “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

Featured in: Book Quotes

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

— Haruki Murakami

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

— Haruki Murakami

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

— Haruki Murakami

287. “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

288. “I’ll never forget you,” I said. “I could never forget you.”

— Haruki Murakami

289. “Overhead, the two moons worked together to bathe the world in a strange light.”

— Haruki Murakami

290. “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

Featured in: Firsts Quotes

291. “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

292. “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

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

— Haruki Murakami

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

— Haruki Murakami

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

— Haruki Murakami

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

— Haruki Murakami

297. “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

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

— Haruki Murakami

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

— Haruki Murakami

300. “A person’s last moments are an important thing. You can’t choose how you’re born but you can choose how you die.”

— Haruki Murakami