Top 500 Haruki Murakami Quotes (2024 Update)
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351. “This is the extent of his knowledge of the sea: it was very big, it was salty, and fish lived there.”

— Haruki Murakami

352. “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

353. “It takes years to build up, it takes moments to destroy.”

— Haruki Murakami

354. “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

355. “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

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

— Haruki Murakami

357. “Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional. Say you’re running and you start to think, Man this hurts, I can’t take it anymore. The hurt part is an unavoidable reality, but whether or not you can stand any more is up to the runner himself. This pretty much sums up the most important aspect of marathon running.”

— Haruki Murakami

358. “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

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

— Haruki Murakami

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

— Haruki Murakami

361. “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

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

— Haruki Murakami

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

— Haruki Murakami

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

— Haruki Murakami

365. “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

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

— Haruki Murakami

367. “Nature grants its beauty to us all, drawing no line between rich and poor.”

— Haruki Murakami

368. “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

369. “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

370. “But what seems like a reasonable distance to one person might feel too far to somebody else.”

— Haruki Murakami

371. “You keep looking at the sea and you start to miss being with people; you stay around people all the time and you just want to go look at the sea.”

— Haruki Murakami

372. “Cats know everything. Not like dogs.”

— Haruki Murakami

373. “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

374. “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

375. “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

376. “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

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

— Haruki Murakami

378. “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

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

— Haruki Murakami

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

— Haruki Murakami

381. “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

382. “I collect records. And cats. I don’t have any cats right now. But if I’m taking a walk and I see a cat, I’m happy.”

— Haruki Murakami

383. “When I first met you, I felt a kind of contradiction in you. You’re seeking something, but at the same time, you are running away for all you’re worth.”

— Haruki Murakami

384. “If I were a shadow, I know I wouldn’t like to be half of what I should be.”

— Haruki Murakami

385. “What I was chasing in circles must have been the tail of the darkness inside me.”

— Haruki Murakami

386. “They sat on a park bench, held hands, and told each other their stories hour after hour. They were not lonely anymore. They had found and been found by their 100% perfect other. What a wonderful thing it is to find and be found by your 100% perfect other. It’s a miracle, a cosmic miracle.”

— Haruki Murakami

387. “Something inside me had dropped away, and nothing came in to fill the cavern.”

— Haruki Murakami

388. “Things outside you are projections of what’s inside you, and what’s inside you is a projection of what’s outside. So when you step into the labyrinth outside you, at the same time you’re stepping into the labyrinth inside.”

— Haruki Murakami

389. “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

390. “Age certainly hadn’t conferred any smarts on me. Character maybe, but mediocrity is a constant, as one Russian writer put it. Russian writers have a way with aphorisms. They probably spend all winter thinking them up.”

— Haruki Murakami

391. “You lost all interest in this world. You were disappointed and discouraged, and lost interest in everything. So you abandoned your physical body. You went to a world apart and you’re living a different kind of life there. In a world that’s inside you.”

— Haruki Murakami

392. “The answer is dreams. Dreaming on and on. Entering the world of dreams and never coming out. Living in dreams for the rest of time.”

— Haruki Murakami

393. “Isn’t life strange? There are people who have so many leftover clothes they can’t stuff them all in their wardrobe. And then there are people like me, whose socks never match.”

— Haruki Murakami

394. “Hundreds of butterflies flitted in and out of sight like short-lived punctuation marks in a stream of consciousness without beginning or end.”

— Haruki Murakami

395. “But if something did happen, it happened. Whether it’s right or wrong. I accept everything that happens, and that’s how I became the person I am now.”

— Haruki Murakami

396. “El destino se lleva siempre su parte y no se retira hasta obtener lo que le corresponde.”

— Haruki Murakami

397. “Everyone may be ordinary, but they’re not normal.”

— Haruki Murakami

398. “The journey I’m taking is inside me. Just like blood travels down veins, what I’m seeing is my inner self and what seems threatening is just the echo of the fear in my heart.”

— Haruki Murakami

399. “It’s because of you when I’m in bed in the morning that I can wind my spring and tell myself I have to live another good day.”

— Haruki Murakami

400. “Stories lie deep in our souls. Stories lie so deep at the bottom of our hearts that they can bring people together on the deepest level. When I write a novel, I go into such depths.”

— Haruki Murakami