Top 160 Sayaka Murata Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “The normal world has no room for exceptions and always quietly eliminates foreign objects. Anyone who is lacking is disposed of.”

— Sayaka Murata

2. “So the manual for life already existed. It was just that it was already ingrained in everyone’s heads, and there wasn’t any need to put it in writing. The specific form of what is considered an “ordinary person” had been there all along, unchanged since prehistoric times I finally realized.”

— Sayaka Murata

3. “I’d noticed soon after starting the job that whenever I got angry at the same things as everyone else, they all seemed happy. If I went along with the manager when he was annoyed or joined in the general irritation at someone skiving off the night shift, there was a strange sense of solidarity as everyone seemed pleased that I was angry too.”

— Sayaka Murata

4. “I no longer knew what standard to live by. Until now, my body had belonged to the convenience store, even when I wasn’t working. Sleeping, keeping in good physical shape, and eating nutritiously were all part of my job. I had to stay healthy for work.”

— Sayaka Murata

5. “When something was strange, everyone thought they had the right to come stomping in all over your life to figure out why. I found that arrogant and infuriating, not to mention a pain in the neck. Sometimes I even wanted to hit them with a shovel to shut them up, like I did that time in elementary school. But I recalled how upset my sister had been when I’d casually mentioned this to her before and kept my mouth shut.”

— Sayaka Murata

6. “You eliminate the parts of your life that others find strange – maybe that’s what everyone means when they say they want to ‘cure” me.”

— Sayaka Murata

7. “When something was strange, everyone thought they had the right to come stomping in all over your life to figure out why.”

— Sayaka Murata

8. “I wished I was back in the convenience store where I was valued as a working member of staff and things weren’t as complicated as this. Once we donned our uniforms, we were all equals regardless of gender, age, or nationality – all simply store workers.”

— Sayaka Murata

9. “The normal world has no room for exceptions and always quietly eliminates foreign objects. Anyone who is lacking is disposed of. So that’s why I need to be cured. Unless I’m cured, normal people will expurgate me.”

— Sayaka Murata

10. “When you work in a convenience store, people often look down on you for working there. I find this fascinating, and I like to look them in the face when they do this to me. And as i do so I always think: that’s what a human is.”

— Sayaka Murata

11. “After all, I absorb the world around me, and that’s changing all the time. Just as all the water that was in my body last time we met has now been replaced with new water, the things that make up me have changed too.”

— Sayaka Murata

12. “A convenience store is not merely a place where customers come to buy practical necessities, it has to be somewhere they can enjoy and take pleasure in discovering things they like.”

— Sayaka Murata

13. “The sensation that the world is slowly dying feels good.”

— Sayaka Murata

14. “The long-forgotten silence sounded like music I’d never heard before.”

— Sayaka Murata

15. “This society hasn’t changed one bit. People who don’t fit into the village are expelled: men who don’t hunt, women who don’t give birth to children. For all we talk about modern society and individualism, anyone who doesn’t try to fit in can expect to be meddled with, coerced, and ultimately banished from the village.”

— Sayaka Murata

16. “I am one of those cogs, going round and round. I have become a functioning part of the world, rotating in the time of day called morning.”

— Sayaka Murata

17. “Deep down I wanted some kind of change. Any change, whether good or bad, would be better than the state of impasse I was in now.”

— Sayaka Murata

18. “El pasatiempo favorito de las personas normales es juzgar a las que no lo son.”

— Sayaka Murata

19. “Anyone who devotes their life to fighting society in order to be free must be pretty sincere about suffering.”

— Sayaka Murata

20. “So that was it: now that she thinks he’s “one of us” she can lecture him. She’s far happier thinking her sister is normal, even if she has a lot of problems, than she is having an abnormal sister for whom everything is fine. For her, normality – however messy – is far more comprehensible.”

— Sayaka Murata

21. “I find the shape of people’s eyes particularly interesting when they’re being condescending. I see a wariness or a fear of being contradicted or sometimes a belligerent spark ready to jump on any attack. And if they’re unaware of being condescending, their glazed-over eyeballs are steeped in a fluid mix of ecstasy and a sense of superiority.”

— Sayaka Murata

22. “She’s far happier thinking her sister is normal, even if she has a lot of problems, than she is having an abnormal sister for whom everything is fine.”

— Sayaka Murata

23. “Infecting each other like this is how we maintain ourselves as human is what I think.”

— Sayaka Murata

24. “You’re probably right about society being in the Stone Age. Anyone not needed in the village is persecuted and shunned.”

— Sayaka Murata

25. “A convenience store is a forcibly normalized environment where foreign matter is immediately eliminated. The threatening atmosphere that had briefly permeated the store was swept away, and the customers again concentrated on buying their coffee and pastries as if nothing had happened.”

— Sayaka Murata

26. “People who are considered normal enjoy putting those who aren’t on trial, you know.”

— Sayaka Murata

27. “Bagiku diam adalah cara terbaik, seni hidup paling rasional untuk menjalani hidup.”

— Sayaka Murata

28. “For eighteen years, there has always been a manager, even if his appearance keeps changing. Although each is different, taken all together I sometimes have the feeling they are but one single creature.”

— Sayaka Murata

29. “When I can’t sleep, I think about the transparent glass box that is still stirring with life even in the darkness of night. That pristine aquarium is still operating like clockwork. As I visualize the scene, the sounds of the store reverberate in my eardrums and lull me to sleep.”

— Sayaka Murata

30. “I find the shape of people’s eyes particularly interesting when they’re being condescending. I see a wariness or a fear of being contradicted or sometimes a belligerent spark ready to jump on any attack.”

— Sayaka Murata

31. “For her, normality – however messy – is far more comprehensible.”

— Sayaka Murata

32. “Up until now he’d been ranting about people meddling in his life, yet here he was attacking me with the same kinds of reproaches that were making him suffer. His argument was falling apart I thought. Maybe people who thought they were being violated felt a bit better when they attacked other people in the same way.”

— Sayaka Murata

33. “I was just thinking how much brisker the morning session was when the manager led it, when Shiraha muttered under his breath: “Ugh, it’s just like a religion!” Of course it is, I thought.”

— Sayaka Murata

34. “A convenience store is a forcibly normalized environment, so the likes of you are fixed right away.”

— Sayaka Murata

35. “Oh, I thought absently, I’ve become a foreign object. In my mind’s eye I saw Shiraha, who had been forced to leave the store. Maybe it would be my turn next. The normal world has no room for exceptions and always quietly eliminates foreign objects. Anyone who is lacking is disposed of. So that’s why I need to be cured. Unless I’m cured, normal people will expurgate me. Finally I understood why my family had tried so hard to fix me.”

— Sayaka Murata

36. “It is the start of another day, the time when the world wakes up and the cogs of society begin to move. I am one of those cogs, going round and round. I have become a functioning part of the world, rotating in the time of day called morning.”

— Sayaka Murata

37. “Deep in the mountains of Akishina where Granny and Grandpa live, fragments of night linger even at midday.”

— Sayaka Murata

38. “Magical powers. I have to summon my magical powers. The power of darkness, the power of wind – any magical power will do, but I need something. I have to use my magical powers on my whole body before my heart feels anything.”

— Sayaka Murata

39. “Since coming here, I sometimes wonder whether there really are any true Earthlings at all. Maybe we’re all Popinpobopians. We were Popinpobopians from the start, and Earthling brainwashing worked for everyone except us three. Earthlings are just an illusion created by Popinpobopians to enable us to live on another planet.”

— Sayaka Murata

40. “When I first started here, there was a detailed manual that taught me how to be a store worker, and I still don’t have a clue how to be a normal person outside that manual.”

— Sayaka Murata

41. “As far as I was concerned, there wasn’t any difference between my friend Miho’s child and my nephew, and I didn’t understand the logic of coming out all the way here just to see him. Maybe this particular baby should be more important to me than the others. But so far as I could see, aside from a few minor differences they were all just an animal called a baby and looked much the same, just like stray cats all looked much the same.”

— Sayaka Murata

42. “As long as you wear the skin of what’s considered an ordinary person and follow the manual, you won’t be driven out of the village or treated as a burden.”

— Sayaka Murata

43. “At that moment, for the first time ever, I felt I’d become a part in the machine of society. I’ve been reborn, I thought. That day, I actually became a normal cog in society.”

— Sayaka Murata

44. “Seeing how excited she was, it occurred to me that it wasn’t such a stretch to say that contemporary society was still stuck in the Stone Age after all. So the manual for life already existed. It was just that it was already ingrained in everyone’s heads, and there wasn’t any need to put it in writing.”

— Sayaka Murata

45. “The sooner I was brainwashed the better. That way I would no longer suffer.”

— Sayaka Murata

46. “My present self is formed almost completely of the people around me. I am currently made up of 30 percent Mrs. Izumi, 30 percent Sugawara, 20 percent the manager, and the rest absorbed from past colleagues such as Sasaki, who left six months ago, and Okasaki, who was our supervisor until a year ago.”

— Sayaka Murata

47. “Sometimes I thought being a Popinpobopian was effectively a mental illness that I had needed in order to protect myself, and the only way I would ever recover was by becoming a slave of the Factory.”

— Sayaka Murata

48. “After all, I absorb the world around me, and that’s changing all the time.”

— Sayaka Murata

49. “If you don’t have a husband or career, you have no value for society.”

— Sayaka Murata

50. “My present self is formed almost completely of the people around me.”

— Sayaka Murata