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45 Famous Haruki Murakami Quotes
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By Sean Gagne
- November 25, 2020
Today, I put together some famous Haruki Murakami quotes that I wanted to share because Murakami is one of my favorite writers.
The Haruki Murakami quotes that I selected are from his novels: South of the Border – West of the Sun, Kafka on the Shore, Sputnik Sweetheart, Norwegian Wood, Dance Dance Dance, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, After the Quake, A Wild Sheep Chase, IQ84, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, Blind Willow – Sleeping Woman, and Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage.
While you read these Haruki Murakami quotes, you can easily see why he is considered as “among the world’s greatest living novelists.” Also, you don’t have to read his book to appreciate his wisdom because these Haruki Murakami quotes are powerful and deep.
45 Famous Haruki Murakami Quotes
2. “I think you still love me, but we can’t escape the fact that I’m not enough for you. I knew this was going to happen. So I’m not blaming you for falling in love with another woman. I’m not angry, either. I should be, but I’m not. I just feel pain. A lot of pain. I thought I could imagine how much this would hurt, but I was wrong.” – Haruki Murakami, South of the Border, West of the Sun
3. “And once the storm is over, you won’t remember how you made it through, how you managed to survive. You won’t even be sure, whether the storm is really over. But one thing is certain. When you come out of the storm, you won’t be the same person who walked in. That’s what this storm’s all about.” – Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore
4. “If you remember me, then I don’t care if everyone else forgets.” – Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore
6. “Why do people have to be this lonely? What’s the point of it all? Millions of people in this world, all of them yearning, looking to others to satisfy them, yet isolating themselves. Why? Was the earth put here just to nourish human loneliness?” – Haruki Murakami, Sputnik Sweetheart
7. “Anyone who falls in love is searching for the missing pieces of themselves. So anyone who’s in love gets sad when they think of their lover. It’s like stepping back inside a room you have fond memories of, one you haven’t seen in a long time.” – Haruki Murakami
8. “Sometimes when I look at you, I feel I’m gazing at a distant star. It’s dazzling, but the light is from tens of thousands of years ago. Maybe the star doesn’t even exist any more. Yet sometimes that light seems more real to me than anything.” – Haruki Murakami, South of the Border, West of the Sun
10. “No matter how much suffering you went through, you never wanted to let go of those memories.” – Haruki Murakami
11. “But who can say what’s best? That’s why you need to grab whatever chance you have of happiness where you find it, and not worry about other people too much. My experience tells me that we get no more than two or three such chances in a life time, and if we let them go, we regret it for the rest of our lives.” – Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood
12. “It’s like Tolstoy said. Happiness is an allegory, unhappiness a story.” – Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore
14. “I was always hungry for love. Just once, I wanted to know what it was like to get my fill of it — to be fed so much love I couldn’t take any more. Just once.” – Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood
15. “Unfortunately, the clock is ticking, the hours are going by. The past increases, the future recedes. Possibilities decreasing, regrets mounting.” – Haruki Murakami, Dance Dance Dance
16. “I have this strange feeling that I’m not myself anymore. It’s hard to put into words, but I guess it’s like I was fast asleep, and someone came, disassembled me, and hurriedly put me back together again. That sort of feeling.” – Haruki Murakami, Sputnik Sweetheart
18. “Memories and thoughts age, just as people do. But certain thoughts can never age, and certain memories can never fade.” – Haruki Murakami, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle
19. “So that’s how we live our lives. No matter how deep and fatal the loss, no matter how important the thing that’s stolen from us–that’s snatched right out of our hands–even if we are left completely changed, with only the outer layer of skin from before, we continue to play out our lives this way, in silence. We draw ever nearer to the end of our allotted span of time, bidding it farewell as it trails off behind. Repeating, often adroitly, the endless deeds of the everyday. Leaving behind a feeling of immeasurable emptiness.” – Haruki Murakami, Sputnik Sweetheart
20. “No matter how far you travel, you can never get away from yourself.” – Haruki Murakami, After the Quake
22. “If you’re in pitch blackness, all you can do is sit tight until your eyes get used to the dark” – Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood
23. “Most everything you think you know about me is nothing more than memories.” – Haruki Murakami, A Wild Sheep Chase
24. “Even if we could turn back, we’d probably never end up where we started.” – Haruki Murakami, 1Q84
26. “It is not that the meaning cannot be explained. But there are certain meanings that are lost forever the moment they are explained in words.” – Haruki Murakami, 1Q84
27. “So the fact that I’m me and no one else is one of my greatest assets. Emotional hurt is the price a person has to pay in order to be independent.” – Haruki Murakami, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running
28. “I realize full well how hard it must be to go on living alone in a place from which someone has left you, but there is nothing so cruel in this world as the desolation of having nothing to hope for.” – Haruki Murakami, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle
30. “I don’t care what you do to me, but I don’t want you to hurt me. I’ve had enough hurt already in my life. More than enough. Now I want to be happy.” – Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood
31. “It’s hard to tell the difference between sea and sky, between voyager and sea. Between reality and the workings of the heart.” – Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore
32. “Time weighs down on you like an old, ambiguous dream. You keep on moving, trying to sleep through it. But even if you go to the ends of the earth, you won’t be able to escape it. Still, you have to go there- to the edge of the world. There’s something you can’t do unless you get there.” – Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore
34. “I said nothing for a time, just ran my fingertips along the edge of the human-shaped emptiness that had been left inside me.” – Haruki Murakami, Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman
35. “You can hide memories, but you can’t erase the history that produced them.” – Haruki Murakami, Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage
36. “You can keep as quiet as you like, but one of these days somebody is going to find you.” – Haruki Murakami, 1Q84
38. “What we seek is some kind of compensation for what we put up with.” – Haruki Murakami, Dance Dance Dance
39. “If you can’t understand it without an explanation, you can’t understand it with an explanation.” – Haruki Murakami, 1Q84
40. “People leave strange little memories of themselves behind when they die.” – Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood
42. “If you think God’s there, He is. If you don’t, He isn’t. And if that’s what God’s like, I wouldn’t worry about it.” – Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore
43. “Even chance meetings are the result of karma… Things in life are fated by our previous lives. That even in the smallest events there’s no such thing as coincidence.” – Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore
44. “Life is not like water. Things in life don’t necessarily flow over the shortest possible route.” – Haruki Murakami, 1Q84
Sean Gagne
I am just a normal guy who loves philosophy and wants to share his love with the rest of the world. If you'd like to know more, check out my about me!
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