69 Quotes From Haruki Murakami On What It Means to be Human
There’s something for everyone in his colourful universe
When I was 14 years old, I attended my first literary workshop. Everyone had to tell a little bit about the last book they read. For me that book was ‘Chasing Wild Sheep’ by Haruki Murakami.
The workshop facilitator asked me about my thoughts on his writing.
‘It’s alright, it’s only the first book I’ve read of his, so I think I want to read some more before I know for sure.’
So I kept reading. Years of reading passed and my book shelf was increasingly aware of it. The more I read, the more I was falling in love with Murakami’s storylines. Each next chapter was an opportunity for growth, each book a different recommendation for whoever came my way.
Today all I can say is…
Haruki Murakami is a true contemporary literary virtuoso & his books are worth re-reading for I promise you each time you’ll find a different story than you remember.
Murakami has a line for everything, for everyone. His words are more than filled — rather, overflowing — with understanding, and if not, then they imply the act of questioning, which is as important as the answers we seek.
I invite you to take a moment and explore some of his most brilliant ideas below as to what it means to be human in today’s world.
“Body cells replace themselves every month. Even at this very moment. Most everything you think you know about me is nothing more than memories.”
A Wild Sheep Chase
“Whatever it is you’re seeking won’t come in the form you’re expecting.”
Kafka on the Shore
“Is it possible, in the final analysis, for one human being to achieve perfect understanding of another? We can invest enormous time and energy in serious efforts to know another person, but in the end, how close can we come to that person’s essence? We convince ourselves that we know the other person well, but do we really know anything important about anyone?”
The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle
“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?”
Sputnik Sweetheart
“Each person feels pain in his own way, each has his own scars.”
Kafka on the Shore
“I sometimes think that people’s hearts are like deep wells. Nobody knows what’s at the bottom. All you can do is imagine by what comes floating to the surface every once in a while.”
Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman
“No matter how long you stand there examining yourself naked before a mirror, you’ll never see reflected what’s inside.”
What I Talk About When I Talk About Running
“Everybody’s born with some different thing at the core of their existence. And that thing, whatever it is, becomes like a heat source that runs each person from the inside. I have one too, of course. Like everybody else. But sometimes it gets out of hand. It swells or shrinks inside me, and it shakes me up. What I’d really like to do is find a way to communicate that feeling to another person.”
The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle
“It’s not as if our lives are divided simply into light and dark. There’s shadowy middle ground. Recognizing and understanding the shadows is what a healthy intelligence does. And to acquire a healthy intelligence takes a certain amount of time and effort.”
After Dark
“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.”
After Dark
“One heart is not connected to another through harmony alone. They are, instead, linked deeply through their wounds. Pain linked to pain, fragility to fragility. There is no silence without a cry of grief, no forgiveness without bloodshed, no acceptance without a passage through acute loss. That is what lies at the root of true harmony.”
Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage
“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.”
1Q84
“We’re so caught up in our everyday lives that events of the past, like ancient stars that have burned out, are no longer in orbit around our minds. There are just too many things we have to think about every day, too many new things we have to learn. New styles, new information, new technology, new terminology … But still, no matter how much time passes, no matter what takes place in the interim, there are some things we can never assign to oblivion, memories we can never rub away. They remain with us forever, like a touchstone.”
Kafka on the Shore
“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.”
Sputnik Sweetheart
“People sometimes sneer at those who run every day, claiming they’ll go to any length to live longer. But I don’t think that’s the reason most people run. Most runners run not because they want to live longer, but because they want to live life to the fullest. If you’re going to while away the years, it’s far better to live them with clear goals and fully alive than in a fog, and I believe running helps you do that. Exerting yourself to the fullest within your individual limits: that’s the essence of running, and a metaphor for life — and for me, for writing as well. I believe many runners would agree.”
What I Talk About When I Talk About Running
“I never trust people with no appetite. It’s like they’re always holding something back on you.”
Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World
“Most people are not looking for provable truths. As you said, truth is often accompanied by intense pain, and almost no one is looking for painful truths. What people need is beautiful, comforting stories that make them feel as if their lives have some meaning.”
1Q84
“No truth can cure the sadness 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 that sadness through to the end and learn something from it, but what we learn will be no help in facing the next sadness that comes to us without warning.”
Norwegian Wood
“Memories warm you up from the inside. But they also tear you apart.”
Kafka on the Shore
“The world is full of ways and means to waste time.”
Dance Dance Dance
“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.”
What I Talk About When I Talk About Running
“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.”
Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World
“People leave traces of themselves where they feel most comfortable, most worthwhile.”
Dance Dance Dance
“Whiskey, like a beautiful woman, demands appreciation. You gaze first, then it’s time to drink.”
Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World
“I’m a very ordinary human being; I just happen to like reading books.”
1Q84
“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.”
Norwegian Wood
“Never let fear and stupid pride make you lose someone who’s precious to you.”
Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage
“Listen up — there’s no war that will end all wars.”
Kafka on the Shore
“Nobody’s easier to fool, than the person who is convinced that he is right.”
1Q84
“Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional.”
What I Talk About When I Talk About Running
“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, in fact, 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.”
Kafka on the Shore
“What happens when people open their hearts?” // “They get better.”
Norwegian Wood
“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.”
Dance Dance Dance
“I am struck by how, except when you’re young, you really need to prioritize in life, figuring out in what order you should divide up your time and energy. If you don’t get that sort of system set by a certain age, you’ll lack focus and your life will be out of balance.”
What I Talk About When I Talk About Running
“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.”
Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman
“It’s the same with menus and men and just about anything else: we think we’re choosing things for ourselves, but in fact we may not be choosing anything. It could be that everthing’s being decided in advance and we pretend we’re making choices. Free will may be an illusion. I often think that.”
1Q84
“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.”
The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle
“Two people can sleep in the same bed and still be alone when they close their eyes”
Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World
“As long as you have the courage to admit mistakes, things can be turned around.”
Kafka on the Shore
“Even if we could turn back, we’d probably never end up where we started.”
1Q84
“Distance might not solve anything, no matter how far you run.”
Kafka on the Shore
“Despite your best efforts, people are going to be hurt when it’s time for them to be hurt.”
Norwegian Wood
“Every one of us is losing something precious to us. Lost opportunities, lost possibilities, feelings we can never get back again. That’s part of what it means to be alive.”
Kafka on the Shore
“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.”
Norwegian Wood
“Your work should be an act of love, not a marriage of convenience.”
Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman
“Once again, life had a lesson to teach me: It takes years to build up, it takes moments to destroy.”
Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World
“Sometimes taking time is actually a shortcut.”
What I Talk About When I Talk About Running
“The human heart is like a night bird. Silently waiting for something, and when the time comes, it flies straight toward it.”
Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage
“Whenever I look at the ocean, I always want to talk to people, but when I’m talking to people, I always want to look at the ocean.”
Hear the Wind Sing
“No matter how far you travel, you can never get away from yourself.”
After the Quake
“In everybody’s life there’s a point of no return. And in a very few cases, a point where you can’t go forward anymore. And when we reach that point, all we can do is quietly accept the fact. That’s how we survive.”
Kafka on the Shore
“Only where there is disillusionment and depression and sorrow does happiness arise; without the despair of loss, there is no hope.”
Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World
“If you’re in pitch blackness, all you can do is sit tight until your eyes get used to the dark”
Norwegian Wood
“Sometimes we don’t need words. Rather, it’s words that need us. If we were no longer here, words would lose their whole function. They would end up as words that are never spoken, and words that aren’t spoken are no longer words.”
Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman
“Life is not like water. Things in life don’t necessarily flow over the shortest possible route.”
1Q84
“I realize now that the reality of things is not something you convey to people but something you make.”
The Elephant Vanishes
“Spend your money on the things money can buy. Spend your time on the things money can’t buy.”
The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle
“It’s good when food tastes good, it’s kind of like proof you’re alive.”
Norwegian Wood
“But even so, every now and then I would feel a violent stab of loneliness. The very water I drink, the very air I breathe, would feel like long, sharp needles. The pages of a book in my hands would take on the threatening metallic gleam of razor blades. I could hear the roots of loneliness creeping through me when the world was hushed at four o’clock in the morning.”
The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle
“Death is not the opposite of life, but a part of it.”
Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman
“People leave strange little memories of themselves behind when they die.”
Norwegian Wood
“Memories and thoughts age, just as people do. But certain thoughts can never age, and certain memories can never fade.”
The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle
“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.”
1Q84
“In terms of evolutionary history, it was only yesterday that men learned to walk around on two legs and get in trouble thinking complicated thoughts. So don’t worry, you’ll burn out.”
The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle
“You have to wait until tomorrow to find out what tomorrow will bring.”
What I Talk About When I Talk About Running
“Life’s no piece of cake, mind you, but the recipe’s my own to fool with.”
Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World
“What we see before us is just one tiny part of the world. We get in the habit of thinking, this is the world, but that’s not true at all. The real world is a much darker and deeper place than this, and much of it is occupied by jellyfish and things.”
The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle
“And you’ll return to real life. You need to live it to the fullest. No matter how shallow and dull things might get, this life is worth living. I guarantee it.”
Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage
If you’re still to discover the power of Haruki Murakami’s writings, here are three different ways to approach his books:
- Start with ‘Chasing Wild Sheep’ if you fancy investigation filled with light philosophical exploration
- Start with ‘Sputnik Sweetheart’ if you like short novels that give you a thrilling ride into a different reality
- Start with ‘Kafka on the Shore’ if you’re in the mood for some real psychological investigation of the human psyche
I’d love to hear about your favourite Murakami moments & please share any further book recommendations 🤗
