Haruki Murakami Quotes

What we call the present is given shape by an accumulation of the past.

What you see with your eyes is not necessarily real.

What's nurtured slowly grows well.

When someone is trying very hard to get something, they don't. And when they're running away from something as hard as they can, it usually catches up with them.

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, sl...

Whenever I get into something, I shut out everything else.

Whenever I meet people for the first time, I get them to talk for ten minutes. Then I size them up from the exact opposite perspective of all they’ve told me. Do you think that’s crazy?No, I said, sha...

Whether by chance conjunction or not, the wind-up bird was a powerful presence in Cinnamon’s story. The cry of this bird was audible only to certain special people, who were guided by it toward inesca...

Whether it's good for anything or not, cool or totally uncool, in the final analysis what's most important is what you can't see but can feel in your heart.

Who can really distinguish between the sea and what's reflected in it? Or tell the difference between the falling rain and loneliness?

Why are you staring at me? she’d ask.‘Cause you’re pretty, I’d reply.You’re the first one who’s ever said that.I’m the only one who knows, I’d tell her. And believe me, I know.

Why do people have to build such depressing places? I'm not saying that every nook and cranny of the world has to be beautiful, but does it have to be this ugly?

With my own hands, I had to construct this thing I called ‘I’ –or, rather, make the things that constituted me.

You are a pastel-colored Persian carpet, and loneliness is a Bordeaux wine stain that won’t come out

You can keep as quiet as you like, but one of these days somebody is going to find you.

You have to overcome the fear and anger inside you, the boy named Crow says. Let a bright light shine in and melt the coldness in your heart. That’s what being tough is all about. Do that and you real...

You know what girls are like. They turn twenty or twenty-one and all of a sudden they start having these concrete ideas. They get super realistic. And when that happens, everything that seemed so swee...

You're walking through a field all by yourself one day in spring and this sweet little bear cub with velvet fur and shiny little eyes comes walking along. And he says to you, 'Hi, there, little lady....

Your problem is that your shadow is a bit - how should I put it? Faint. I thought this the first time I laid eyes on you, that the shadow you cast on the ground is only half as dark as that of ordinar...

You’re here, I continued. At least you look as if you’re here. But maybe you aren’t. Maybe it’s just your shadow. The real you may be someplace else. Or maybe you already disappeared, a long, long tim...