Haruki Murakami is a Japanese writer. His novels, essays, and short stories have been bestsellers in Japan as well as internationally, with his work translated into 50 languages and selling millions of copies outside Japan. some of his famous books are Kafka on the Shore, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, Norwegian Wood, After the Quake , Underground, Sputnik Sweetheart. Here are some positive and life changing Haruki Murakami quotes.
Inspirational Haruki Murakami Quotes
“Exerting yourself to the limit over and over again, that is the essence of running. Running is painful, but the pain doesn’t leave me, I can take care of it. That agrees with my mentality.”
“Sometimes I find it too hot to run, and sometimes too cold. Or too cloudy. But I still go running. I know that if I didn’t go running, I wouldn’t go the next day either. It’s not in human nature to take unnecessary burdens upon oneself, so one’s body soon becomes disaccustomed. It mustn’t do that. It’s the same with writing. I write every day so that my mind doesn’t become disaccustomed.”
“Memories warm you up from the inside. But they also tear you apart.”
“Running taught me to have faith in my skills as a writer. I learned how much I can demand of myself, when I need a break, and when the break starts to get too long. I known how hard I am allowed to push myself.”
“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.”
“When a writer develops a story, he is confronted with a poison that is inside him. If you don’t have that poison, your story will be boring and uninspired. It’s like fugu: The flesh of the pufferfish is extremely tasty, but the roe, the liver, the heart can be lethally toxic.”
“If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking.”
“If you remember me, then I don’t care if everyone else forgets.”
“Even if we could turn back, we’d probably never end up where we started.”
“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.”
“Nobody likes being alone that much. I don’t go out of my way to make friends, that’s all. It just leads to disappointment.”
“In this world, there are things you can only do alone, and things you can only do with somebody else. It’s important to combine the two in just the right amount.”
“Possibilities are like cancer. The more I think about them, the more they multiply, and there’s no way to stop them. I’m out of control.”
“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?”
“I didn’t feel like I was in my own body; my body was just a lonely, temporary container I happened to be borrowing.”
“If writing novels is like planting a forest, then writing short stories is more like planting a garden.”
“There’s a special feeling you get on a veranda that you just can’t get anywhere else.”
“Each individual has their own unique color, which shines faintly around the contours of their body. Like a halo. Or a backlight. I’m able to see those colors clearly.”
“In long-distance running the only opponent you have to beat is yourself, the way you used to be.”
“If you can love someone with your whole heart, even one person, then there’s salvation in life. Even if you can’t get together with that person.”
“Listen up – there’s no war that will end all wars.”
“There is nothing so cruel in this world as the desolation of having nothing to hope for.”
“If you’re young and talented, it’s like you have wings.”
“Silence, I discover, is something you can actually hear.”
“No one could say how long that life would last. Whatever has form can disappear in an instant.”
“Become like a sheet of blotting paper and soak it all in. Later on you can figure out what to keep and what to unload.”
“Everything passes. Nobody gets anything for keeps. And that’s how we’ve got to live.”
“Don’t feel sorry for yourself. Only * do that.”
“As I see it, you are living with something that you keep hidden deep inside. Something heavy. I felt it from the first time I met you. You have a strong gaze, as if you have made up your mind about something. To tell you the truth, I myself carry such things around inside. Heavy things. That is how I can see it in you.”
“Even so, there were times I saw freshness and beauty. I could smell the air, and I really loved rock ‘n’ roll. Tears were warm, and girls were beautiful, like dreams. I liked movie theaters, the darkness and intimacy, and I liked the deep, sad summer nights.”
“Letters are just pieces of paper,” I said. “Burn them, and what stays in your heart will stay; keep them, and what vanishes will vanish.”
“Unfortunately, the clock is ticking, the hours are going by. The past increases, the future recedes. Possibilities decreasing, regrets mounting.”
“I don’t go out of my way to make friends, that’s all.”
“Everyone who has something is afraid of losing it, and people with nothing are worried they’ll forever have nothing. Everyone is the same.”
Life quotes by Murakami
“An unhealthy soul requires a healthy body.”
“Nothing in the real world is as beautiful as the illusions of a person about to lose consciousness.”
“Exerting yourself to the fullest within your individual limits: that’s the essence of running, and a metaphor for life”
“He does not exist here, with me, but flesh that does not exist will never die, and promises unmade are never broken.”
“I want to write about people who dream and wait for the night to end, who long for the light so they can hold the ones they love.”
“The sky grew darker, painted blue on blue, one stroke at a time, into deeper and deeper shades of night.”
“You got to know your limits. Once is enough, but you got to learn. A little caution never hurt anyone. A good woodsman has only one scar on him. No more, no less.”
“Which is why I am writing this book. To think. To understand. It just happens to be the way I’m made. I have to write things down to feel I fully comprehend them.”
“No matter how far you travel, you can never get away from yourself.”
“The world is an inherently unfair place.”
“What you see with your eyes is not necessarily real.”
“I want you always to remember me. Will you remember that I existed, and that I stood next to you here like this?”
“You can hide memories, but you cant erase the history that produced them”
“Between the time the last train leaves and the first train arrives, the place changes: it’s not the same as in daytime.”
“Most everything you think you know about me is nothing more than memories.”
“He felt as if his heart had dried up. I needed her he thought. I needed someone like her to fill the void inside me. But I wasn’t able to fill the void inside her. Until the bitter end, the emptiness inside her was hers alone.”
“I keep to this routine every day without variation. The repetition itself becomes the important thing; it’s a form of mesmerism. I mesmerize myself to reach a deeper state of mind.”
“We’re both looking at the same moon, in the same world. We’re connected to reality by the same line. All I have to do is quietly draw it towards me.”
“Life is a lot more fragile than we think. So you should treat others in a way that leaves no regrets. Fairly, and if possible, sincerely.”
“I was feeling lonely without her, but the fact that I could feel lonely at all was consolation. Loneliness wasn’t such a bad feeling. It was like the stillness of the pin oak after the little birds had flown off.”
“Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional.”
“Nothing so consumes a person as meaningless exertion”
“I’m a coward when it comes to matters of the heart. That is my fatal flaw.”
“I don’t know, there’s something about you. Say there’s an hourglass: the sand’s about to run out. Someone like you can always be counted on to turn the thing over.”
“The answer is dreams. Dreaming on and on. Entering the world of dreams and never coming out. Living in dreams for the rest of time.”
“Music brings a warm glow to my vision, thawing mind and muscle from their endless wintering.”
“What I think is this: You should give up looking for lost cats and start searching for the other half of your shadow.”
“What matters is deciding in your heart to accept another person completely. When you do that, it is always the first time and the last.”
“But what seems like a reasonable distance to one person might feel too far to somebody else.”
“Distance might not solve anything, no matter how far you run.”
“Life is here, death is over there. I am here, not over there.”
“As time goes on, you’ll understand. What lasts, lasts; what doesn’t, doesn’t. Time solves most things. And what time can’t solve, you have to solve yourself.”
“There are three ways you can get along with a girl: one, shut up and listen to what she has to say; two, tell her you like what she’s wearing; and three, treat her to really good food…If you do all that and still don’t get the results you want, better give up.”
“No truth can cure the sorrow 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 it through to the end and learn something from it, but what we learn will be no help in facing the next sorrow that comes to us without warning.”
“Fairness is a concept that holds only in limited situations. Yet we want the concept to extend to everything, in and out of phase. From snails to hardware stores to married life. Maybe no one finds it, or even misses it, but fairness is like love. What is given has nothing to do with what we seek.”
“Writers have to keep on writing if they want to mature, like caterpillars endlessly chewing on leaves.”
“One listless day followed another, with nothing to distinguish one from the next. You could have changed the order and no one would have noticed.”
“You can keep as quiet as you like, but one of these days somebody is going to find you.”
“Reality was utterly coolheaded and utterly lonely.”
“That’s what the world is , after all: an endless battle of contrasting memories.”
“As long as I was alive, I was something. That was just how it was. But somewhere along the way it all changed. Living turned me into nothing.”
“I didn’t have much to say to anybody but kept to myself and my books. With my eyes closed, I would touch a familiar book and draw it’s fragrance deep inside me. This was enough to make me happy.”
“Nobody’s going to win all the time. On the highway of life you can’t always be in the fast lane.”
“The most important thing we learn at school is the fact that the most important things can’t be learned at school.”
Positive quotes by Haruki Murakami
“Open your eyes, train your ears, use your head. If a mind you have, then use it while you can.”
“Kindness and a caring mind are two separate qualities. Kindness is manners. It is superficial custom, an acquired practice. Not so the mind. The mind is deeper, stronger, and, I believe, it is far more inconstant.”
“Unclose your mind. You are not a prisoner. You are a bird in fight, searching the skies for dreams.”
“Don’t pointless things have a place, too, in this far-from-perfect world? Remove everything pointless from an imperfect life, and it’d lose even its imperfection.”
“Life doesn’t require ideals. It requires standards of action.”
“Memories and thoughts age, just as people do. But certain thoughts can never age, and certain memories can never fade.”
“The power to concentrate was the most important thing. Living without this power would be like opening ones eyes without seeing anything.”
“Life is not like water. Things in life don’t necessarily flow over the shortest possible route.”
“Sometimes taking time is actually a shortcut.”
“Knowledge and ability were tools, not things to show off.”
“In a sense, I’m the one who ruined me: I did it myself.”
“We never choose anything at all. Things happen. Or not.”
“Everything in life is a metaphor.”
“You don’t have to judge the whole world by your own standards. Not everybody is like you, you know.”
“Everybody has to start somewhere. You have your whole future ahead of you. Perfection doesn’t happen right away.”
“Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional. Say you’re running and you think, a Man, this hurts, I cant take it anymore. The hurt part is an unavoidable reality, but whether or not you can stand anymore is up to the runner himself.”
“A gentleman is someone who does not what he wants to do, but what he should do.”
“Most runners run not because they want to live longer, but because they want to live life to the fullest.”
“People’s memories are maybe the fuel they burn to stay alive.”
“There has to be pain. That’s the rule.”
“I happen to like the strange ones. People who look normal and leads normal lives – they’re the ones you have to watch out for.”
“The better you were able to imagine what you wanted to imagine, the farther you could flee from reality.”
“If you do anything out of the ordinary, you can be sure someone, somewhere, will get upset.”
“Anyone who falls in love is searching for the missing pieces of themselves.”
“Some things in life are too complicated to explain in any language.”
“People leave strange little memories of themselves behind when they die.”
“I dream. Sometimes I think that’s the only right thing to do.”
“There’s no such thing as perfect writing, just like there’s no such thing as perfect despair.”
“Loneliness becomes an acid that eats away at you.”
“That’s what we all do: endlessly take the long way around.”
“You’re afraid of imagination and even more afraid of dreams. Afraid of the resposibility that begins in dreams. But you have to sleep and dreams are a part of sleep. When you’re awake you can suppress imagination but you can’t supress dreams.”
“What was lost was lost. There was no retrieving it, however you schemed, no returning to how things were, no going back.”
“In the end, like so many beautiful promises in our lives, that dinner date never came to be.”
“Someone who can search for something is happy. Searching gives a meaning to life. Nowadays it’s not so easy to find something you might be looking for. The most important thing, however, is the search itself, the way you take. It’s not so important where it leads. that’s why my characters are always looking for something, maybe only a cat, a sheep or a wife, but that is at least the beginning of a story.”