Top 160 Sayaka Murata Quotes (2026 Update)
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101. “I want you to hide me from everyone who knows me. I haven’t caused any trouble for anyone, but they all think nothing of poking their noses into my life. I just want to exist, quietly breathing.”

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

— Sayaka Murata

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

— Sayaka Murata

106. “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

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

— Sayaka Murata

108. “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

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

— Sayaka Murata

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

— Sayaka Murata

111. “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

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

— Sayaka Murata

113. “It was the first time anyone had ever taught me how to accomplish a normal facial expression and manner of speech.”

— 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. “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

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. “Staying alive is about coming up with ideas. Living on the ideas that we come up with.”

— Sayaka Murata

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

— Sayaka Murata

120. “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

121. “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

122. “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

123. “I had the feeling I was being told they wanted to settle the matter this way because that was the easiest option for them.”

— Sayaka Murata

124. “Walking like this, feeling like a feral human, even machines and buildings were warm to the touch, and some emitted sounds and vibrations. Their presence was similar to the sounds emitted by life-forms in the forest.”

— Sayaka Murata

125. “I had never been given any affirmation at home, so I was hungry for praise. When I was complimented, even on a whim by a hysterical teacher, my chest grew hot, and for some reason I felt like crying.”

— Sayaka Murata

126. “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

127. “They can’t let go of the knowledge they’ve accumulated, even though it’s nothing more than data.”

— Sayaka Murata

128. “Em va semblar que qualsevol canvi, tant si era positiu com si no, seria millor que quedar-me tal com estava en aquell moment.”

— Sayaka Murata

129. “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

130. “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

131. “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

132. “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

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

— Sayaka Murata

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

— Sayaka Murata

135. “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

136. “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

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

— Sayaka Murata

138. “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

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

— Sayaka Murata

140. “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

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

— Sayaka Murata

142. “Sobreviver, haja o que houver.”

— Sayaka Murata

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

— Sayaka Murata

144. “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

145. “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

146. “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

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

— Sayaka Murata

148. “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

149. “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

150. “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