Haruki Murakami Quotes
Page 7 of 10

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

— Haruki Murakami

302. “I have to somehow get connected to reality again, he thought, or else I won’t be me anymore. I’ll become a man who doesn’t exist.”

— Haruki Murakami

303. “I go back to the reading room, where I sink down in the sofa and into the world of The Arabian Nights. Slowly, like a movie fadeout, the real world evaporates. I’m alone, inside the world of the story. My favourite feeling in the world.”

— Haruki Murakami

304. “You can have tons of talent, but it won’t necessarily keep you fed. If you have sharp instincts, through, you’ll never go hungry.”

— Haruki Murakami

305. “I am 55 years old now. It takes three years to write one book. I don’t know how many books I will be able to write before I die. It is like a countdown. So with each book I am praying – please let me live until I am finished.”

— Haruki Murakami

306. “You can see a person’s whole life in the cancer they get.”

— Haruki Murakami

307. “This is pretty obvious, but until things happen, they haven’t happened. And often things aren’t what they seem.”

— Haruki Murakami

308. “No matter how far they go, people can never be anything but themselves.”

— Haruki Murakami

309. “Give yourself five minutes to consider how you can turn a miserable situation to your benefit and that light bulb is going to click on.”

— Haruki Murakami

310. “When you fall in love, the natural thing to do is give yourself to it.”

— Haruki Murakami

311. “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

312. “Once she was out of the car and gone, my world was suddenly hollow and meaningless.”

— Haruki Murakami

313. “Sometimes I get real lonely sleeping with you.”

— Haruki Murakami

314. “She gave me this look – she might have been watching from a lifeboat as the ship went down. Or maybe it was the other way around.”

— Haruki Murakami

315. “Reality’s just the accumulation of ominous prophecies come to life. All you have to do is open a newspaper on any given day to weigh the good news versus the bad news, and you’ll see what I mean.”

— Haruki Murakami

316. “Time is too conceptual. Not that it stops us from filling it in. So much so, we can’t even tell whether our experiences belong to time or to the world of physical things.”

— Haruki Murakami

317. “I don’t know how many good books I still have in me; I hope there are another four or five.”

— Haruki Murakami

318. “I don’t want our relationship to end like this. You’re one of the very few friends I have, and it hurts not being able to see you. When am I going to be able to talk to you? I want you to tell me that much, at least.”

— Haruki Murakami

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

— Haruki Murakami

320. “I always feel like I’m struggling to become someone else. Like I’m trying to find a new place, grab hold of a new life, a new personality. I guess it’s part of growing up; it’s also an attempt to reinvent myself.”

— Haruki Murakami

321. “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

322. “With luck, it might even snow for us.”

— Haruki Murakami

323. “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

324. “Time expands, then contracts, all in tune with the stirrings of the heart.”

— Haruki Murakami

325. “Beyond the edge of the world there’s a space where emptiness and substance neatly overlap, where past and future form a continuous, endless loop. And, hovering about, there are signs no one has ever read, chords no one has ever heard.”

— Haruki Murakami

326. “There are ways of dying that don’t end in funerals. Types of death you can’t smell.”

— Haruki Murakami

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

— Haruki Murakami

328. “Sometimes when I look at you, I feel I’m gazing at a distant star. It’s dazzling, but the light is from tens of thousands of years ago. Maybe the star doesn’t even exist any more. Yet sometimes that light seems more real to me than anything.”

— Haruki Murakami

329. “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

330. “What a terrible thing it is to wound someone you really care for and to do it so unconsciously.”

— Haruki Murakami

331. “It’s like Tolstoy said. Happiness is an allegory, unhappiness a story.”

— Haruki Murakami

332. “Nothing in the real world is as beautiful as the illusions of a person about to lose consciousness.”

— Haruki Murakami

333. “Time moves in it special way in the middle of the night.”

— Haruki Murakami

334. “I tell lies sometimes. The last time I lied was a year ago. I absolutely detest lying. You could say that lying and silence are the two greatest sins of present day society. Actually, I lie a lot, and I’m always clamming up.”

— Haruki Murakami

335. “That’s what we all do: endlessly take the long way around.”

— Haruki Murakami

336. “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

337. “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

338. “Everyone just keeps on disappearing. Some things vanish, like they were cut away. Others fade slowly into the mist. And all that remains is a desert.”

— Haruki Murakami

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

— Haruki Murakami

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

— Haruki Murakami

341. “You have to make an effort to always look at the good side, always think about the good things. Then you’ve got nothing to be afraid of. If something bad comes up, you do more thinking at that point.”

— Haruki Murakami

342. “Autumn finally arrived. And when it did, I came to a decision. Something had to give: I couldn’t keep on living like this.”

— Haruki Murakami

343. “It is a lonely life sometimes, like throwing a stone into the deep darkness. It might hit something, but you can’t see it. The only thing you can do is to guess, and to believe.”

— Haruki Murakami

344. “I think of rivers, of tides. Forests and water gushing out. Rain and lightning. Rocks and shadows. All of these are in me.”

— Haruki Murakami

345. “I’ve always done whatever I felt like doing in life. People may try to stop me, and convince me I’m wrong, but I won’t change.”

— Haruki Murakami

346. “The silence grew deeper, so deep that if you listened carefully you might very well catch the sound of the earth revolving on its axis.”

— Haruki Murakami

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

— Haruki Murakami

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

— Haruki Murakami

349. “One heart is not connected to another through harmony alone. They are, instead, linked deeply through their wounds.”

— Haruki Murakami

350. “I never could stand being forced to do something I didn’t want to do at a time I didn’t want to do it. Whenever I was able to do something I liked to do, though, when I wanted to do it, and the way I wanted to do it, I’d give it everything I had.”

— Haruki Murakami