Top 160 Sayaka Murata Quotes (2026 Update)
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101. “He seemed to have this odd circuitry in his mind that allowed him to see himself only as the victim and never the perpetrator I thought as I watched him.”

— Sayaka Murata

102. “If we kissed, we could go inside the skin. That’s probably why grown-ups kissed. It had never occurred to me that there was such an animal-like meaning in the romantic kisses I’d read about in girls’ manga.”

— Sayaka Murata

103. “Love is a drug made in the brain to enable humans to mate. It’s simply an anesthetic. In other words, it’s an illusion made to prettify the painful mating act, to reduce the suffering and disgust of the sexual act. We might be able to use this anesthetic if we’re ever in pain. But for now I don’t think it’s necessary.”

— Sayaka Murata

104. “Our nakedness around the house was innocent, as if we had returned to the time before Adam and Eve ate the apple.”

— Sayaka Murata

105. “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

106. “Family” is hard work I thought.”

— Sayaka Murata

107. “How long did I have to survive for? Would I ever be able to live without constantly trying to survive?”

— Sayaka Murata

108. “Children’s lives never belong to them. The grown-ups own us. If your mom abandons you, you won’t be able to eat, and you can’t go anywhere without help from a grown-up. It’s the same for all children.” He reached out a hand to cut a flower from the bed. “That’s why we have to try hard to survive until we’ve grown up ourselves.”

— Sayaka Murata

109. “I found society as annoying as he did, but there wasn’t anything about myself that I particularly wanted to defend, so I couldn’t understand why Shiraha was taking it out on me like this. Well, I dare say life is tough for him, I thought, sipping at my warm water.”

— Sayaka Murata

110. “Christ’s Last Supper was simple fare with bread and wine.”

— Sayaka Murata

111. “I guess anyone who devotes their life to fighting society in order to.”

— Sayaka Murata

112. “What I’m really scared of is believing that the words society makes me speak are my own. You’re different. That’s how I know you’re from another planet.”

— Sayaka Murata

113. “Now, too, I felt reassured by the expression on Mrs. Izumi and Sugawara’s faces: Good, I pulled off being a “person.”

— Sayaka Murata

114. “My body was not my own. I had always been secretly shrinking the role I had been assigned as a tool of society.”

— Sayaka Murata

115. “Shizuka never used that many emojis, but she did favor stars and musical notes, so I used them in my answer to her too. I didn’t mean anything much by it. I just thought that matching myself to others might help reduce the chances of causing offense if, for example, my words came across as too tense or gloomy or perhaps too curt and cold.”

— Sayaka Murata

116. “Normality was contagious, and exposure to the infection was necessary to keep up with it.”

— Sayaka Murata

117. “My husband and I were people they’d failed to brainwash, and anyone who remained unbrainwashed had to keep up an act in order to avoid being eliminated by the Factory.”

— Sayaka Murata

118. “When I think that my body is entirely made up of food from this store, I feel like I’m as much a part of the store as the magazine racks or the coffee machine.”

— Sayaka Murata

119. “The seaside is great. Humans have lived by the ocean since ancient times, so our DNA responds to it fondly. That’s what he’d said at the time.”

— Sayaka Murata

120. “Both Mom and my sister kept going on and on about how wonderful motherhood was, as if it were some kind of religion. I was still hoping to be brainwashed. But repeating ‘motherhood is wonderful’ over and over like a Buddhist chant was hardly going to be enough to brainwash me on its own. It just made me uncomfortable.”

— Sayaka Murata

121. “Do it a lot and make a family, then once the relationship has cooled, you play around outside the marriage. That’s the way it is for lots of couples, isn’t it? Playing around is a man’s reward. Your father has had his fair share, haven’t you dear? But really, not even doing it at all from the start, that’s not what marriage is about, is it now?”

— Sayaka Murata

122. “Cousin Yuu was my boyfriend.”

— Sayaka Murata

123. “Yuu, have you ever thought that your life doesn’t belong to you?”

— Sayaka Murata

124. “I stuffed the food before me into my body so that I would be fit to work again tomorrow.”

— Sayaka Murata

125. “Listening to my friends go on about me and Shiraha was like hearing them talk about a couple of total strangers. They seemed to have the story wrapped up between them. It was about characters who had the same names as we did, but who had absolutely nothing to do with me or Shiraha.”

— Sayaka Murata

126. “The door opened quietly, and a tall man, almost six feet and lanky like a wire coat hanger, came in, his head drooping.”

— Sayaka Murata

127. “Being treated crudely as a tool for society was clearer than all that talk of falling in love, and actually I wasn’t upset by it at all.”

— Sayaka Murata

128. “It’s handy having a dumpster in the house. In this house, that’s my role. When Dad and Mom and Kise get so fed up they can’t bear it any longer, they dump everything onto me.”

— Sayaka Murata

129. “The phrase “close-knit family,” which I’d come across in a school library book and had stuck in my mind, always came back to me whenever I saw my parents and sister together. If I wasn’t here, the three of them would make a perfect unit. So I wanted them to spend time together as a close-knit family without me now and then.”

— Sayaka Murata

130. “It must be nutritious, but I don’t see any data about humans using sperm in cooking.”

— Sayaka Murata

131. “Society was a system for falling in love. People who couldn’t fall in love had to fake it. What came first: the system or love?”

— Sayaka Murata

132. “I wasn’t the sort to have many friends, and whenever she texted me I found it annoying but was also kind of relieved. Without her to ground me, I thought, I and my husband could easily be left behind together by society.”

— Sayaka Murata

133. “Even though the physical body was the same, the type of alcohol had a different effect depending on the character.”

— Sayaka Murata

134. “Having been made to suffer by the religion of romantic love, we wanted to be saved by the religion of family.”

— Sayaka Murata

135. “Good, I pulled off being a “person.”

— Sayaka Murata

136. “All the adults had jumped to the unfounded conclusion that I must be an abused child and blamed my family. That way they could understand why I’d done such a terrible thing and therefore have a peace of mind.”

— Sayaka Murata

137. “Because those are the rules of the Factory. We’re slaves to our genes.”

— Sayaka Murata

138. “Normality is the creepiest madness there is. This was all insane, yet it was so right.”

— Sayaka Murata

139. “From the tone of her voice, it was clear that my sister was not speaking for herself but on behalf of society. I envied her ability to do that.”

— Sayaka Murata

140. “She had always been exemplary in learning to be a woman, truly a straight-A student. It looked excruciatingly tiring.”

— Sayaka Murata

141. “From where I stood, there were two types of prejudiced people – those who had a deep-rooted urge for prejudice and those who unthinkingly repeated a barrage of slurs they’d heard somewhere. Shiraha appeared to be the latter.”

— Sayaka Murata

142. “Sobreviver, haja o que houver.”

— Sayaka Murata

143. “Oh yes, it’s true, you’ve got a chronic condition, haven’t you? It must be really tough on you.” “You’ve been like that for ages now. Are you okay?”

— Sayaka Murata

144. “Assim, sempre pensando o que precisava me curar, fui me tornando adulta.”

— Sayaka Murata

145. “Nonhuman lives jostled up against the window. The presence of nonhuman creatures was stronger at night. Strangely enough, though I was a little scared, I felt as though my own feral cells were throbbing.”

— Sayaka Murata

146. “Sanae lived in a trim little apartment building crammed into a small space in a major office district. As she walked in her high heels between the rows of buildings, she couldn’t shake the sensation that she, too, was one of these buildings.”

— Sayaka Murata

147. “Well, how are you?” my mother went on. “You spend all day on your feet, Keiko. It must be tiring. Um, how have things been lately? What’s new?” Hearing her pry like this, I got the feeling that somehow she was still hoping for some kind of new development in my life. She was probably a bit tired of how I hadn’t progressed at all in eighteen years. When I told her everything was fine as usual, she sounded both relieved and disappointed at once.”

— Sayaka Murata

148. “Anyone who didn’t manufacture new life – or wasn’t obviously trying to – came under gentle pressure. Couples that hadn’t manufactured new life had to demonstrate their contribution to the Factory through their work. My husband and I were living quietly in a corner of the Factory, keeping our heads down.”

— Sayaka Murata

149. “Our fall vacation was to be one month. That was our limit. If we stayed any longer, our savings would run out, and people from the Factory wouldn’t keep quiet either.”

— Sayaka Murata

150. “That’s the image of you that pleases them the most.”

— Sayaka Murata