HMHaruki Murakami

781 collected words

Haruki Murakami

Dates not recorded

Name supplied in the contributor-provided quotation collection. Basic attribution label; identity, lifetime and quotation authenticity have not been independently verified.

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Quotations and sayings

01Undated

There were times he thought it would have been far better to never have known. Yet he continued to return to his core principle: that, in every situation, knowledge was better than ignorance. However agonizing, it was necessary to confront the facts. Only through knowing could a person become strong.

Haruki Murakami / quote

02Undated

Of course it hurt that we could never love each other in a physical way. We would have been far more happy if we had. But that was like the tides, the change of seasons--something immutable, an immovable destiny we could never alter. No matter how cleverly we might shelter it, our delicate friendship wasn't going to last forever. We were bound to reach a dead end. That was painfully clear.

Haruki Murakami / quote

03Undated

So that’s how we live our lives. No matter how deep and fatal theloss, no matter how important the thing that's stolen from us - that'ssnatched right out of our hands - even if we are left completelychanged, with only the outer layer of skin from before, we continue toplay out our lives this way, in silence. We draw ever nearer to theend of our allotted span of time, bidding it farewell as it trails offbehind. Repeating, often adroitly, the endless deeds of the everyday. Leaving behind a feeling of insurmountable emptiness...Maybe, in some distant place, everything is already, quietly, lost.Or at least there exists a silent place where everything candisappear, melting together in a single, overlapping figure. And aswe live our lives we discover - drawing toward us the thin threadsattached to each - what has been lost. I closed my eyes and tried tobring to mind as many beautiful lost things as I could. Drawing themcloser, holding on to them. Knowing all the while that their livesare fleeting.

Haruki Murakami / quote

04Undated

In traveling, a companion, in life, compassion,'" she repeats, making sure of it. If she had paper and pencil, it wouldn't surprise me if she wrote it down. "So what does that really mean? In simple terms." I think it over. It takes me a while to gather my thoughts, but she waits patiently. "I think it means," I say, "that chance encounters are what keep us going. In simple terms.

Haruki Murakami / quote

05Undated

It's just a feeling I have. What you see with your eyes is not necessarily real. My enemy is, among other things, the me inside me.

Haruki Murakami / quote

06Undated

Tendencies. Yougottendencies. Soevenifyoudideverythingoveragain, yourwholelife, yougottendenciestodojustwhatyoudid, alloveragain. -The Sheep Man.

Haruki Murakami / quote

07Undated

Things change everyday. With each new dawn, it is not the same world as before. And you’re not the same person you were either.

Haruki Murakami / quote

08Undated

Unfortunately, the clock is ticking, the hours are going by. The past increases, the future recedes. Possibilities decreasing, regrets mounting.

Haruki Murakami / quote

09Undated

For a while" is a phrase whose length can't be measured.At least by the person who's waiting.

Haruki Murakami / quote

10Undated

Time flows in strange ways on Sundays, and sights become mysteriously distorted.

Haruki Murakami / quote

11Undated

Time really is one big continuous cloth, no? We habitually cut out pieces of time to fit us, so we tend to fool ourselves into thinking that time is our size, but it really goes on and on.

Haruki Murakami / quote

12Undated

Silence. How long it lasted, I couldn't tell. It might have been five seconds, it might have been a minute. Time wasn't fixed. It wavered, stretched, shrank. Or was it me that wavered, stretched, and shrank in the silence? I was warped in the folds of time, like a reflection in a fun house mirror.

Haruki Murakami / quote

13Undated

I guess time doesn't flow in order, does it - A, B, C, D? It just sort of goes where it feels like going.

Haruki Murakami / quote

14Undated

The passage of time will usually extract the venom of most things and render them harmless

Haruki Murakami / quote

15Undated

Every story has a time to be told

Haruki Murakami / quote

16Undated

Time does not expand.""But time is actually expanding, isn't it? You yourself said that time adds up.""That's only because time needed for transit has decreased. The sum total of time doesn't change. It's only that you can see more movies.

Haruki Murakami / quote

17Undated

Sheep hurt my father, and through my father, sheep have also hurt me.

Haruki Murakami / quote

18Undated

Human beings are ultimately nothing but carriers-passageways- for genes. They ride us into the ground like racehorses from generation to generation. Genes don't think about what constitutes good or evil. They don't care whether we are happy or unhappy. We're just means to an end for them. The only thing they think about is what is most efficient for them.

Haruki Murakami / quote

19Undated

When I was little, I had this science book. There was a section on 'What would happen to the world if there was no friction?' Answer: 'Everything on earth would fly into space from the centrifugal force of revolution.' That was my mood.

Haruki Murakami / quote

20Undated

If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking.

Haruki Murakami / quote

21Undated

When I open them, most of the books have the smell of an earlier time leaking out between the pages - a special odor of the knowledge and emotions that for ages have been calmly resting between the covers. Breathing it in, I glance through a few pages before returning each book to its shelf.

Haruki Murakami / quote

22Undated

There weren't any curtains in the windows, and the books that didn't fit into the bookshelf lay piled on the floor like a bunch of intellectual refugees.

Haruki Murakami / quote

23Undated

Have books ‘happened’ to you? Unless your answer to that question is ‘yes,’ I’m unsure how to talk to you

Haruki Murakami / quote

24Undated

The years nineteen and twenty are a crucial stage in the maturation of character, and if you allow yourself to become warped when you're that age, it will cause you pain when you're older.

Haruki Murakami / quote