Explore Quotes by Haruki Murakami

When I was fifteen, all I wanted was to go off to some other world, a place beyond anybody’s reach. A place beyond the flow of time.” - But there’s no place like that in this world. - Exactly. Which is why I’m living here, in this world where things are continually damaged, where the heart is fickle, where time flows past without a break.

Please remember: things are not what they seem.

I'd made it back to the land of the living. No matter how boring or mediocre a world it might be, this was it.

Loneliness becomes an acid that eats away at you.

Wherever there's hope there's a trial.

I'm a coward when it comes to matters of the heart. That is my fatal flaw.

In a sense, I'm the one who ruined me: I did it myself.

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

But I didn't walk a single step. I stopped a lot to stretch, but I never walked. I didn't come here to walk. I came to run. That's the reason-the only reason-I flew all the way to the northern tip of Japan. No matter how slow I might run, I wasn't about to walk. That was the rule.

When you see runners in town is easy to distinguish beginners from veterans. The ones panting are beginners; the ones with quiet, measured breathing are the veterans. Their hearts, lost in thought, slowly tick away time. When we pass each other on the road, we listen to the rhythm of each other's breathing, and sense the way the other person is ticking away the moments.

By then running had entered the realm of the metaphysical. First there came the action of running, and accompanying it there was this entity known as me. I run; therefore I am.

I didn't start running because somebody asked me to become a runner. Just like I didn't become a novelist because someone asked me to. One day, out of the blue, I wanted to write a novel. And one day, out of the blue, I started to run-simply because I wanted to. I've always done whatever I felt like doing in life. People may try to stop me, and convince me I'm wrong, but I won't change.

All imperfections are forced upon the imperfect, so the 'perfect' can live content and oblivious.

I hate requests. They make me feel unhappy. It's like when I take a book out of the library. As soon as I start to read it, all I can think about is when I'll finish it.

There's a special feeling you get on a veranda that you just can't get anywhere else.

Can'ttrustpeople. Won'tdoanygood. They'llkillyoueverytime. They'llkilleachother. They'llkilleveryone.

I'm scared," she said. "These days I feel like a snail without a shell." "I'm scared too," I said. "I feel like a frog without any webs." She looked up and smiled. Wordlessly we walked over to a shaded part of the building and held each other and kissed, a shell-less snail and a webless frog.

Hundreds of butterflies flitted in and out of sight like short-lived punctuation marks in a stream of consciousness without beginning or end.

What I want is for the two of us to meet somewhere by chance one day, like, passing on the street, or getting on the same bus.

A person's last moments are an important thing. You can't choose how you're born but you can choose how you die.

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