Haruki Murakami Quotes
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401. “There’s a special feeling you get on a veranda that you just can’t get anywhere else.”

— Haruki Murakami

402. “There is nothing in this world that never takes a step outside a person’s heart.”

— Haruki Murakami

403. “I contented myself with whiskey, for medicinal purposes. It helped numb my various aches and pains. Not that the alcohol actually reduced the pain; it just gave the pain a life of its own, apart from mine.”

— Haruki Murakami

404. “Never trust a man who carries a handkerchief, I always say. One of many prejudicial rules of thumb.”

— Haruki Murakami

405. “Spending plenty of time on something can be the most sophisticated form of revenge.”

— Haruki Murakami

406. “I used to run a full marathon in three hours and 25 or 26 minutes. Not any more.”

— Haruki Murakami

407. “The best musicians transpose consciousness into sound; painters do the same for color and shape.”

— Haruki Murakami

408. “Everything was too sharp and clear, so that I could never tell where to start- the way a map that shows too much can sometimes be useless.”

— Haruki Murakami

409. “As I already explaned, I don’t have any form. I’m a conceptual metaphysical object.”

— Haruki Murakami

410. “The most dangerous creature here would have to be me. So maybe I’m just scared of my own shadow.”

— Haruki Murakami

411. “Is it possible to become friends with a butterfly?”

— Haruki Murakami

412. “Certain kinds of knowledge rob people of their sleep.”

— Haruki Murakami

413. “That’s how stories happen – with a turning point, an unexpected twist. There’s only one kind of happiness, but misfortune comes in all shapes and sizes. It’s like Tolstoy said. Happiness is an allegory, unhappiness a story.”

— Haruki Murakami

414. “A deserted library in the morning – there’s something about it that really gets to me. All possible words and ideas are there, resting peacefully.”

— Haruki Murakami

415. “One day, I lost sight of her. I happened to glance away for a moment, and when I turned back, she had disappeared.”

— Haruki Murakami

416. “Besides being the world the kind of sadness that can not be expressed in tears. You can not explain it to anyone. Unable to take any shape, settles quietly in the bottom of the heart as snow during the windless night.”

— Haruki Murakami

417. “The faintest gleam of their lost memories glimmered for the briefest moment in their hearts.”

— Haruki Murakami

418. “The problem was, I think, that the places I fit in were always falling behind the rimes.”

— Haruki Murakami

419. “Fate seems to be taking me in some even stranger directions.”

— Haruki Murakami

420. “I wasn’t particularly afraid of death itself. As Shakespeare said, die this year and you don’t have to die the next.”

— Haruki Murakami

421. “If writing novels is like planting a forest, then writing short stories is more like planting a garden.”

— Haruki Murakami

422. “Exerting yourself to the fullest within your individual limits: that’s the essence of running, and a metaphor for life – and for me, for writing as well. I believe many runners would agree.”

— Haruki Murakami

423. “Things change everyday. With each new dawn, it is not the same world as before. And you’re not the same person you were either.”

— Haruki Murakami

424. “What would tomorrow bring? I wondered. Both hands on the wheel, I closed my eyes. I didn’t feel like I was in my own body; my body was just a lonely, temporary container I happened to be borrowing. What would become of me tomorrow I did not know.”

— Haruki Murakami

425. “You have to patiently learn to live together with your shadow. And carefully observe the darkness that resides within you. Sometimes in a dark tunnel you have to confront your own dark side.”

— Haruki Murakami

426. “Relax your body, and the rest of you will lighten up.”

— Haruki Murakami

427. “The good thing about writing book is that you can dream while you are awake...”

— Haruki Murakami

428. “When I am writing, I do not distinguish between the natural and supernatural. Everything seems real. That is my world, you could say.”

— Haruki Murakami

429. “It’s not me but the world that’s deranged.”

— Haruki Murakami

430. “All things in my novels are real for me. Some western critics said that Garcia Marquez’s novels are magic realism. However, I believe that Marquez must have experienced everything in his novels.”

— Haruki Murakami

431. “My priority is my books, at least at this point. What I have to do is write the narrative of this time.”

— Haruki Murakami

432. “We each have a special something we can get only at a special time of our life. like a small flame. A careful, fortunate few cherish that flame, nurture it, hold it as a torch to light their way. But once that flame goes out, it’s gone forever.”

— Haruki Murakami

433. “I wondered if she was trying to convey something to me, something she could not put into words – something prior to words that she could not grasp within herself and which therefore had no hope of ever turning into words.”

— Haruki Murakami

434. “For me, writing a novel is like having a dream. Writing a novel lets me intentionally dream while I’m still awake. I can continue yesterday’s dream today, something you can’t normally do in everyday life.”

— Haruki Murakami

435. “When I was a teenager, I thought how great it would be if only I could write novels in English. I had the feeling that I would be able to express my emotions so much more directly than if I wrote in Japanese.”

— Haruki Murakami

436. “He placed this doubt inside a drawer in his mind labeled “Pending” and postponed any further consideration. He had many such drawers inside him, with numerous doubts and questions tucked away.”

— Haruki Murakami

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

— Haruki Murakami

438. “Accurate knowledge does not improve people’s lives. The objective does not necessarily surpass the subjective, you know. Reality does not necessarily extinguish fantasy... There are channels through which reality can become unreal, or unreality can enter the realm of the real. If we desire it that strongly. Deep in our heart. But that didn’t mean we were free. It might demonstrate quite the opposite.”

— Haruki Murakami

439. “Once thing goes wrong, then the whole house of cards collapses. And there’s no way you can extricate yourself. Until someone comes along to drag you out.”

— Haruki Murakami

440. “Because brains packed with knowledge are yummy, that’s why. They’re nice and creamy. And sort of grainy at the same time.”

— Haruki Murakami

441. “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

442. “I have a lot more patience for others than I have for myself, and I am much better at bringing out the best in others than in myself. That’s just the kind of person I am. I’m the scratchy stuff on the side of the matchbox.”

— Haruki Murakami

443. “Maybe the only thing I can definitely say about is this: That’s life. Maybe the only thing we can do is accept it, without really knowing what’s going on.”

— Haruki Murakami

444. “She was seriously in love, but she never made demands.”

— Haruki Murakami

445. “It is the same with anything – you have to learn through your own experience, paying your own way. You can’t learn it from a book.”

— Haruki Murakami

446. “All you have to do is wait,” I explained. “Sit tight and wait for the right moment. Not try to change anything by force, just watch the drift of things. Make an effort to cast a fair eye on everything. If you do that, you just naturally know what to do. But everyone’s always too busy. They’re too talented, their schedules are too full. They’re too interested in themselves to think about what’s fair.”

— Haruki Murakami

447. “Love and used Subarus were two different things. Weren’t they?”

— Haruki Murakami

448. “I don’t know much about the world, but I do know one thing for sure. If I’m pessimistic, then the adults in this world who are not pessimistic are a bunch of idiots.”

— Haruki Murakami

449. “When I start to write, I don’t have any plan at all. I just wait for the story to come.”

— Haruki Murakami

450. “If I choose to write about sheep, it’s just because I happened to write about sheep. There is no deep significance.”

— Haruki Murakami