Haruki Murakami

Novelist

1949-01-12

Haruki Murakami is a Japanese novelist and short-story writer known for surreal and contemporary fiction. His books include Norwegian Wood, Kafka on the Shore, and 1Q84.

Quotes by Haruki Murakami

Living and dying are, in a sense, of equal value.
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once your get your hopes up, your mind starts acting on its own. And when your hopes are dashed you get dissapointed, and dissapointment leads to a feeling of helplessness. You get careless and let your guard down. And right now, she though, that si the last thing I can afford.
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If there's any guy crazy enough to attack me, I'm going to show him the end of the world -- close up. I'm going to let him see the kingdom come with his own eyes. I'm going to send him straight to the southern hemisphere and let the ashes of death rain all over him and the kangaroos and the wallabies.
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No truth can cure the sadness we feel from losing a loved one. No truth, no sincerity, no strength, no kindness, can cure that sorrow. All we can do is see that sadness through to the end andlearn something from it, but what we learn will be no help in facing the next sadness that comes to us without warning.
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The strength I'm looking for isn't the type where you win or lose. I'm not after a wall that'll repel power coming from outside. What I want us the kind of strength to be able to absorb that kind of power, to stand up to it. The strength to quietly endure things - unfairness, misfortunes, sadness, mistakes, misunderstandings.
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Living like an empty shell is not really living, no matter how many years it might go on
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I should have learned many things from that experience, but when I look back on it, all I gained was one single, undeniable fact. That ultimately I am a person who can do evil. I never consciously tried to hurt anyone, yet good intentions notwithstanding, when necessity demanded, I could become completely self-centered, even cruel. I was the kind of person who could, using some plausible excuse, inflict on a person I cared for a wound that would never heal.
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I should have learned many things from that experience, but when I look back on it, all I gained was one single, undeniable fact. That ultimately I am a person who can do evil. I never consciously tried to hurt anyone, yet good intentions notwithstanding, when necessity demanded, I could become completely self-centered, even cruel. I was the kind of person who could, using some plausible excuse, inflict on a person I cared for a wound that would never heal.College transported me to a new town, where I tried, one more time, to reinvent myself. Becoming someone new, I could correct the errors of my past. At first I was optimistic: I could pull it off. But in the end, no matter where I went, I could never change. Over and over I made the same mistake, hurt other people, and hurt myself in the bargain.Just after I turned twenty, this thought hit me: Maybe I've lost the chance to ever be a decent human being. The mistakes I'd committed— maybe they were part of my very makeup, an inescapable part of my being. I'd hit rock bottom, and I knew it.
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Most of the psychological differences between men and women seem to come from differences in their reproductive system
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The laugh left a bitter taste in our mouths, but we laughed out all the same.
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Forgive me for stating the obvious, but the world is made up of all kinds of people. Other people have their own value to live by, and the same holds true with me.
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What I was chasing in circles must have been the tail of the darkness inside me.
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Every person should decide for himself how happy, or unhappy, our society might be.
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If there is a hard, high wall and an egg that breaks against it, no matter how right the wall or how wrong the egg, I will stand on the side of the egg. Why? Because each of us is an egg, a unique soul enclosed in a fragile egg. Each of us is confronting a high wall. The high wall is the system which forces us to do the things we would not ordinarily see fit to do as individuals . . . We are all human beings, individuals, fragile eggs. We have no hope against the wall: it's too high, too dark, too cold. To fight the wall, we must join our souls together for warmth, strength. We must not let the system control us -- create who we are. It is we who created the system. (Jerusalem Prize acceptance speech, JERUSALEM POST, Feb. 15, 2009)
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It was as if - this something I thought of only later, of course - she were gently peeling back one layer after another that covered a person's heart, a very sensual feeling.
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There are some things in this world that can be done over, and some that can't. And time passing is one thing that can't be redone. Come this tar, and you can't come back.
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It was as if-this is something I thought of only later, of course-she was gently peeling bcd one layer after another hat covered a person's heart, a very sensual feeling.
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There are some things in this world that can be done over, and some that can't. And time passing is one thing that can't be undone. Come this far, and you can't go back.
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It was as if - this something I thought of only later, of course - she was gently peeling back one layer after another that covered a person's heart, a very sensual feeling.
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Next she turned the gun upward and thrust the muzzle into her mouth. Now it was aimed directly at her cerebrum-- the gray labyrinth where consciousness resided.
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