Top 160 Sayaka Murata Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “What I’m really scared of is believing the words society makes me speak are my own.”

— Sayaka Murata

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

— Sayaka Murata

103. “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

104. “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

105. “It took all my effort just to remain at my zero level without becoming a minus.”

— Sayaka Murata

106. “People can easily pass judgment on others when they’re protected by their own normality.”

— Sayaka Murata

107. “For the first time, I could think of the me in the window as a being with meaning.”

— Sayaka Murata

108. “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

109. “Look, anyone who doesn’t fit in with the village loses any right to privacy. They’ll trample all over you as they please. You either get married and have kids or go hunting and earn money, and anyone who doesn’t contribute to the village in one of these forms is a heretic. And the villagers will come poking their noses into your life as much as they want.”

— Sayaka Murata

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

— Sayaka Murata

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

— Sayaka Murata

112. “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

113. “Cousin Yuu was my boyfriend.”

— Sayaka Murata

114. “Don’t make it sound so easy! We men have it much harder than women, you know. If you’re not yet a fully fledged member of society, then it’s get a job, and if you’ve got a job, it’s earn more money, and if you earn more money, it’s get married and have offspring. Society is continually judging us. Don’t lump me together with women. You lot have a cushy time of it,” he said sullenly.”

— Sayaka Murata

115. “These past two weeks I’d been asked fourteen times why I wasn’t married. And twelve times why I was still working part-time. So for now I’d decide what to eliminate from my life according to what I was asked about most often I thought.”

— Sayaka Murata

116. “Sometimes I even find myself operating the checkout till in my dreams.”

— Sayaka Murata

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

— Sayaka Murata

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

— Sayaka Murata

119. “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

120. “He was still my husband, but more than that he was a Popinpobopian. This was something I could trust more than marriage.”

— Sayaka Murata

121. “And so, believing that I had to be cured, I grew into adulthood.”

— Sayaka Murata

122. “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

123. “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

124. “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

125. “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

126. “The person who had given birth to me said I was a dead loss, so I decided it really must be true.”

— Sayaka Murata

127. “Sobreviver, haja o que houver.”

— Sayaka Murata

128. “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

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

— Sayaka Murata

130. “It’s really hard to put into words things that are just a little bit not okay. I had the feeling that Mr. Igasaki was a little bit not okay.”

— Sayaka Murata

131. “If they tried it, the memories of the wild rooted in their flesh would come back to them, and they would discover that eating the city like this would connect the earth between the gaps in the concrete and their own body.”

— Sayaka Murata

132. “I’ve been given my freedom, but I’m not any good at being free.”

— Sayaka Murata

133. “I mean, if finding a job is so hard, then at least you should get married.”

— Sayaka Murata

134. “I’d noticed soon after starting the job that whenever I got angry at the same things as everyone else, they all seemed happy.”

— Sayaka Murata

135. “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

136. “You know very well know how much I hate people who insists on their rights while neglecting their duties.”

— Sayaka Murata

137. “I’d never meant to make them sad or have to keep apologizing for things I did, so I decided to keep my mouth shut as best I could outside home. I would no longer do anything of my own accord, and would either just mimic what everyone else was doing, or simply follow instructions.”

— Sayaka Murata

138. “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

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

— Sayaka Murata

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

— Sayaka Murata

141. “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

142. “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

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

— Sayaka Murata

144. “It felt strangely soft, like stroking a blister.”

— Sayaka Murata

145. “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

146. “I couldn’t stop hearing the store telling me the way it wanted to be, what it needed. It was all flowing into me. It wasn’t me speaking. It was the store. I was just channeling its revelations from on high.”

— Sayaka Murata

147. “The number one reason I love you is that you make me human.”

— Sayaka Murata

148. “I simply spoke in a way that I would be liked within whichever community I happened to be in. I responded to wherever I was in order to adapt to it. I was just like a robot.”

— Sayaka Murata

149. “She’d grown up, but even now she still believed strongly in society. She had always been exemplary in learning to be a woman, truly a straight-A student. It looked excruciatingly tiring.”

— Sayaka Murata

150. “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