Top 500 Haruki Murakami Quotes (2025 Update)
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301. “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

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

— Haruki Murakami

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

— Haruki Murakami

304. “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

305. “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

306. “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

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

— Haruki Murakami

308. “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

309. “Maybe she thought the garbage and rocks in your head were interesting. But finally, garbage is garbage and rocks are rocks.”

— Haruki Murakami

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

— Haruki Murakami

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

— Haruki Murakami

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

— Haruki Murakami

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

— Haruki Murakami

314. “You slowly but surely become a has-been.”

— Haruki Murakami

315. “It’s all matter of attitude. You could let a lot of things bother you if you wanted to But it’s pretty much the same anywhere you go, you can manage.”

— Haruki Murakami

316. “Mental acuity was never born from comfortable circumstances.”

— Haruki Murakami

317. “If they invent a car that runs on stupid jokes, you could go far.”

— Haruki Murakami

318. “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

319. “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

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

— Haruki Murakami

321. “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

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

— Haruki Murakami

323. “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

324. “Pain is invisible, and known only to the sufferer.”

— Haruki Murakami

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

— Haruki Murakami

326. “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

327. “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

328. “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

329. “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

330. “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

331. “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

332. “No war is won or lost until the final battle is over.”

— Haruki Murakami

333. “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

334. “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

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

— Haruki Murakami

336. “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

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

— Haruki Murakami

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

— Haruki Murakami

339. “Our life here was just a momentary illusion, and someday reality would yank us back to the world we came from.”

— Haruki Murakami

340. “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

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

— Haruki Murakami

342. “What I’d like to be is a unique writer who’s different from everybody else. I want to be a writer who tells stories unlike other writers’.”

— Haruki Murakami

343. “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

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

— Haruki Murakami

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

— Haruki Murakami

346. “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

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

— Haruki Murakami

348. “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

349. “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

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

— Haruki Murakami