All Time Famous Haruki Murakami Quotes

Haruki Murakami (born January 12, 1949) is a Japanese writer. His novels, essays, and short stories have been bestsellers in Japan and internationally, with his work translated into 50 languages and having sold millions of copies outside Japan. He has received numerous awards for his work, including the Gunzo Prize for New Writers, the World Fantasy Award, the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award, the Franz Kafka Prize, the Jerusalem Prize and the Princess of Asturias Awards.

Haruki Murakami, originally from Ashiya near Kobe, moved to Tokyo for university and published his first novel, “Hear the Wind Sing,” after owning a jazz bar. Notable works include “Norwegian Wood,” “The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle,” “Kafka on the Shore,” and “1Q84.” His writing spans genres like science fiction, fantasy, and crime fiction, featuring magical realist elements. Influenced by Raymond Chandler and Kurt Vonnegut, Murakami admires Kazuo Ishiguro, Cormac McCarthy, and Dag Solstad. He has published short story collections and non-fiction works like “Underground,” based on interviews with Tokyo subway sarin attack victims, and “What I Talk About When I Talk About Running.” Murakami’s fiction has polarized critics, with some labeling him as un-Japanese, but others praising him as an extraordinary and one of the world’s greatest living novelists.

Haruki Murakami Quotes

1. “Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional.”
— Haruki Murakami

2. “If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking.”
— Haruki Murakami

3. “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, 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.”
— Haruki Murakami

4. “I dream. Sometimes I think that’s the only right thing to do.”
— Haruki Murakami

5. “Be fearless, be brave, be bold, love yourself.”
— Haruki Murakami

6. “Unfortunately, the clock is ticking, the hours are going by. The past increases, the future recedes. Possibilities decreasing, regrets mounting.”
— Haruki Murakami

7. “Learning another language is like becoming another person.”
— Haruki Murakami

8. “Sometimes it’s not the people who change, it’s the mask that falls off.”
— Haruki Murakami

9. “When I’m running I don’t have to talk to anybody and don’t have to listen to anybody. This is a part of my day I can’t do without.”
— Haruki Murakami

10. “Don’t you think it would be wonderful to get rid of everything and everybody and just go someplace where you don’t know a soul?”
— Haruki Murakami

11. “Spend your money on the things money can buy. Spend your time on the things money can’t buy.”
— Haruki Murakami

12. “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.”
— Haruki Murakami

13. “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.”
— Haruki Murakami

14. “Memories warm you up from the inside. But they also tear you apart.”
— Haruki Murakami

15. “Everyone, deep in their hearts, is waiting for the end of the world to come.”
— Haruki Murakami

16. “All I do is keep on running in my own cozy, homemade void, my own nostalgic silence. And this is a pretty wonderful thing. No matter what anybody else says.”
— Haruki Murakami

17. “I’m all alone, but I’m not lonely.”
— Haruki Murakami

18. “I move, therefore I am.”
— Haruki Murakami

19. “You don’t have to judge the whole world by your own standards. Not everybody is like you, you know.”
— Haruki Murakami

20. “I just run. I run in a void. Or maybe I should put it the other way: I run in order to acquire a void.”
— Haruki Murakami

21. “As long as you have the courage to admit mistakes, things can be turned around.”
— Haruki Murakami

22. “One foot in front of the other. Repeat as often as necessary to finish.”
— Haruki Murakami

23. “Death is not the opposite of life, but a part of it.”
— Haruki Murakami

24. “Whatever it is you’re seeking won’t come in the form you’re expecting.”
— Haruki Murakami

25. “No matter how far you travel, you can never get away from yourself.”
— Haruki Murakami

26. “I can bear any pain as long as it has meaning.”
— Haruki Murakami

27. “If you remember me, then I don’t care if everyone else forgets.”
— Haruki Murakami

28. “Silence, I discover, is something you can actually hear.”
— Haruki Murakami

29. “A certain type of perfection can only be realized through a limitless accumulation of the imperfect.”
— Haruki Murakami

30. “The most important thing we learn at school is the fact that the most important things can’t be learned at school.”
— Haruki Murakami

31. “You’re not a kid anymore. You have the right to choose your own life. You can start again. If you want a cat, all you have to do is choose a life in which you can have a cat. It’s simple. It’s your right.”
— Haruki Murakami

32. “If you’re in pitch blackness, all you can do is sit tight until your eyes get used to the dark.”
— Haruki Murakami

33. “People fall in love without reason, without even wanting to. You can’t predict it. That’s love.”
— Haruki Murakami

34. “Everything in life is a metaphor.”
— Haruki Murakami

35. “The thing I’m most afraid of is me. Of not knowing what I’m going to do. Of not knowing what I’m doing right now.”
— Haruki Murakami

36. “Say it before you run out of time. Say it before it’s too late. Say what you’re feeling. Waiting is a mistake.”
— Haruki Murakami

37. “You can hide memories, but you can’t erase the history that produced them.”
— Haruki Murakami

38. “I’m a very ordinary human being; I just happen to like reading books.”
— Haruki Murakami

39. “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.”
— Haruki Murakami

40. “People’s memories are maybe the fuel they burn to stay alive.”
— Haruki Murakami

41. “To keep on going, you have to keep up the rhythm.”
— Haruki Murakami

42. “I am nothing. I’m like someone who’s been thrown into the ocean at night, floating all alone. I reach out, but no one is there. I call out, but no one answers. I have no connection to anything.”
— Haruki Murakami

43. “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.”
— Haruki Murakami

44. “If you think of someone enough, you’re sure to meet them again.”
— Haruki Murakami

45. “A theory is a battlefield in your head.”
— Haruki Murakami

46. “Start making excuses and there’s no end to it. I can’t live that kind of life.”
— Haruki Murakami

47. “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.”
— Haruki Murakami

48. “No matter how honestly you open up to someone, there are still things you cannot reveal.”
— Haruki Murakami

49. “I’ve built a wall around me, never letting anybody inside and trying not to venture outside myself.”
— Haruki Murakami

50. “Will you wait for me forever?”
— Haruki Murakami

51. “Chance encounters are what keep us going.”
— Haruki Murakami

52. “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?”
— Haruki Murakami

53. “Distance might not solve anything, no matter how far you run.”
— Haruki Murakami

54. “You can keep as quiet as you like, but one of these days somebody is going to find you.”
— Haruki Murakami

55. “I’m not human. I’m a piece of machinery. I don’t need to feel a thing. Just forge on ahead.”
— Haruki Murakami

56. “If I have left a wound inside you, it is not just your wound but mine as well.”
— Haruki Murakami

57. “I never made any plan before writing, however, I succeeded. I enjoyed writing with excitement,“What happen on the next page?””
— Haruki Murakami

58. “But I didn’t understand then. That I could hurt somebody so badly she would never recover. That a person can, just by living, damage another human being beyond repair.”
— Haruki Murakami

59. “Only the Dead stay seventeen forever.”
— Haruki Murakami

60. “Ordinary imperfect people, always choose similarly imperfect people as friends.”
— Haruki Murakami

61. “Love can rebuild the world, they say, so everything’s possible when it comes to love.”
— Haruki Murakami

62. “There’s no such thing as perfect writing, just like there’s no such thing as perfect despair.”
— Haruki Murakami

63. “Dreams come from the past, not from the future. Dreams shouldn’t control you – you should control them.”
— Haruki Murakami

64. “That’s all I think about these days. Must be because I have so much time to kill every day. When you don’t have anything to do, your thoughts get really, really far out-so far out you can’t follow them all the way to the end.”
— Haruki Murakami

65. “Time flows in strange ways on Sundays, and sights become mysteriously distorted.”
— Haruki Murakami

66. “Does G get angry because it follows F in the alphabet? Does page 68 in a book start a revolution because it follows 67?”
— Haruki Murakami

67. “No matter what the situation may be, I still take pleasure in witnessing the joy of others.”
— Haruki Murakami

68. “I may not be the most likable person in the world, but I try not to upset people.”
— Haruki Murakami

69. “Sometimes fate is like a small sandstorm that keeps changing directions. You change direction but the sandstorm chases you. You turn again, but the storm adjusts.”
— Haruki Murakami

70. “I said nothing for a time, just ran my fingertips along the edge of the human-shaped emptiness that had been left inside me.”
— Haruki Murakami

71. “Living like an empty shell is not really living, no matter how many years it may go on. The heart and flesh of an empty shell give birth to nothing more than the life of an empty shell.”
— Haruki Murakami

72. “Huge organizations and me don’t get along. They’re too inflexible, waste too much time, and have too many stupid people.”
— Haruki Murakami

73. “Everybody has to start somewhere. You have your whole future ahead of you. Perfection doesn’t happen right away.”
— Haruki Murakami

74. “I think history is collective memories. In writing, I’m using my own memory, and I’m using my collective memory.”
— Haruki Murakami

75. “A friend to kill time is a friend sublime.”
— Haruki Murakami

76. “Not just beautiful, though – the stars are like the trees in the forest, alive and breathing. And they’re watching me.”
— Haruki Murakami

77. “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 know how hard I am allowed to push myself.”
— Haruki Murakami

78. “It’s just like Yeats said. In dreams begin responsibilities. Flip this around and you could say that where there’s no power to imagine, no responsibility can arise.”
— Haruki Murakami

79. “Time, of course, topples everyone in its path equally- the way that driver beats his old horse until it dies. But the thrashing we receive is one of frightful gentleness. Few of us even realize that we are being beaten.”
— Haruki Murakami

80. “What we call the present is given shape by an accumulation of the past.”
— Haruki Murakami

81. “Writing a long novel is like survival training. Physical strength is as necessary as artistic sensitivity.”
— Haruki Murakami

82. “Losing you is most difficult for me, but the nature of my love for you is what matters. If it distorts into a half-truth, then perhaps it is better not to love you. I must keep my mind but lose you.”
— Haruki Murakami

83. “I feel like I’ve swallowed a cloudy sky.”
— Haruki Murakami

84. “She’s letting out her feelings. The scary thing is not being able to do that. When your feelings build up and harden and die inside, then you’re in big trouble.”
— Haruki Murakami

85. “Memories and thoughts age, just as people do. But certain thoughts can never age, and certain memories can never fade.”
— Haruki Murakami

86. “All imperfections are forced upon the imperfect, so the ‘perfect’ can live content and oblivious.”
— Haruki Murakami

87. “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.”
— Haruki Murakami

88. “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

89. “Open your eyes, train your ears, use your head. If a mind you have, then use it while you can.”
— Haruki Murakami

90. “We knew exactly what we wanted in each other. And even so, it ended. One day it stopped, as if the film simply slipped off the reel.”
— Haruki Murakami

91. “People lose fifty million skin cells every day. The cells get scraped off and turn into invisible dust, and disappear into the air. Maybe we are nothing but skin cells as far as the world is concerned.”
— Haruki Murakami

92. “As long as I kept my body moving I could forget about the emptiness inside.”
— Haruki Murakami

93. “I get up early in the morning, 4 o’clock, and I sit at my desk and what I do is just dream. After three or four hours, that’s enough. In the afternoon, I run.”
— Haruki Murakami

94. “What I feel for her is a wholly different emotion. It stands and walks on its own, living and breathing and throbbing and shaking me to the roots of my being.”
— Haruki Murakami

95. “If I stayed here, something inside me would be lost forever – something I couldn’t afford to lose. It was like a vague dream, a burning, unfulfilled desire. The kind of dream people have only when they’re seventeen.”
— Haruki Murakami

96. “Exhaustion pays no mind to age or beauty. Like rain and earthquakes and hail and floods.”
— Haruki Murakami

97. “This is no honky-tonk parade. 1Q84 is the real world, where a cut draws real blood, where pain is real pain and fear is real fear. The moon in the sky is no paper moon.”
— Haruki Murakami

98. “Some things, you know, if you say them, it makes them not true?”
— Haruki Murakami

99. “I am worrying about my country. I feel I have a responsibility as a novelist to do something.”
— Haruki Murakami

100. “One of these days they’ll be making a film where the whole human race gets wiped out in a nuclear war, but everything works out in the end.”
— Haruki Murakami

101. “With great knowledge comes great responsibility.”
— Haruki Murakami

102. “Deep rivers run quiet.”
— Haruki Murakami

103. “Now all you can do is wait. It must be hard for you, but there is a right time for everything. Like the ebb and flow of tides. No one can do anything to change them. When it is time to wait, you must wait.”
— Haruki Murakami

104. “I can be hurt, you know. I can get as exhausted as anybody else. I can feel so bad I want to cry, too.”
— Haruki Murakami

105. “The world is an inherently unfair place.”
— Haruki Murakami

106. “People with dark souls have nothing but dark dreams. People with really dark souls do nothing but dream.”
— Haruki Murakami

107. “Knowledge and ability were tools, not things to show off.”
— Haruki Murakami

108. “In long-distance running the only opponent you have to beat is yourself, the way you used to be.”
— Haruki Murakami

109. “When people tell a lie about something, they have to make up a bunch of lies to go with the first one. ‘Mythomania’ is the word for it.”
— Haruki Murakami

110. “Here, too, a brand-new day is beginning. It could be a day like all the others, or it could be a day remarkable enough in many ways to remain in the memory. In either case, for now, for most people, it is a blank sheet of paper.”
— Haruki Murakami

111. “Between a high, solid wall and an egg that breaks against it, I will always stand on the side of the egg.”
— Haruki Murakami

112. “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.”
— Haruki Murakami

113. “No matter how much suffering you went through, you never wanted to let go of those memories.”
— Haruki Murakami

114. “I want you always to remember me. Will you remember that I existed and that I stood next to you here like this?”
— Haruki Murakami

115. “Reaching the finish line, never walking, and enjoying the race. These three, in this order, are my goals.”
— Haruki Murakami

116. “Some things in life are too complicated to explain in any language.”
— Haruki Murakami

117. “You have to wait until tomorrow to find out what tomorrow will bring.”
— Haruki Murakami

118. “Cell phones are so convenient that they’re an inconvenience.”
— Haruki Murakami

119. “Not everything was lost in the flow of time.”
— Haruki Murakami

120. “The pure present is an ungraspable advance of the past devouring the future. In truth, all sensation is already memory.”
— Haruki Murakami

121. “That’s what the world is, after all: an endless battle of contrasting memories.”
— Haruki Murakami

122. “In everybody’s life, there’s a point of no return. And in 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.”
— Haruki Murakami

123. “Don’t let appearances fool you. There’s always only one reality!”
— Haruki Murakami

124. “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.”
— Haruki Murakami

125. “Nights without work I spend with whisky and books.”
— Haruki Murakami

126. “Everything passes. Nobody gets anything for keeps. And that’s how we’ve got to live.”
— Haruki Murakami

127. “Your work should be an act of love, not a marriage of convenience.”
— Haruki Murakami

128. “Wherever there’s hope there’s a trial.”
— Haruki Murakami

129. “Thanks to the long days of rain, the blades of grass glowed with a deep-green luster, and they gave off the smell of wildness unique to things that sink their roots into the earth.”
— Haruki Murakami

130. “Always remember that to argue, and win, is to break down the reality of the person you are arguing against. It is painful to lose your reality, so be kind, even if you are right.”
— Haruki Murakami

131. “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.”
— Haruki Murakami

132. “No matter what they wish for, no matter how far they go, people can never be anything but themselves. That’s all.”
— Haruki Murakami

133. “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.”
— Haruki Murakami

134. “It doesn’t matter how old I get, but as long as I continue to live I’ll always discover something new about myself.”
— Haruki Murakami

135. “Such wounds to the heart will probably never heal. But we cannot simply sit and stare at our wounds forever.”
— Haruki Murakami

136. “I don’t care what you do to me, but I don’t want you to hurt me. I’ve had enough hurt already in my life. More than enough. Now I want to be happy.”
— Haruki Murakami

137. “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.”
— Haruki Murakami

138. “If you can’t understand it without an explanation, you can’t understand it with an explanation.”
— Haruki Murakami

139. “Unclose your mind. You are not a prisoner. You are a bird in fight, searching the skies for dreams.”
— Haruki Murakami

140. “I’ll be happy if running and I can grow old together.”
— Haruki Murakami

141. “Listen up – there’s no war that will end all wars.”
— Haruki Murakami

142. “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.”
— Haruki Murakami

143. “All of us are imperfect human beings living in an imperfect world.”
— Haruki Murakami

144. “The light of morning decomposes everything.”
— Haruki Murakami

145. “Even castles in the sky can do with a fresh coat of paint.”
— Haruki Murakami

146. “Why do I act like this, agreeing when I really disagree, letting people force me to do things I don’t want to do?”
— Haruki Murakami

147. “What I think is this: You should give up looking for lost cats and start searching for the other half of your shadow.”
— Haruki Murakami

148. “Please remember: things are not what they seem.”
— Haruki Murakami

149. “I had my jazz club and I had enough money. So I didn’t have to write for my living.”
— Haruki Murakami

150. “So this was how secrets got started, I thought to myself. People constructed them little by little.”
— Haruki Murakami

151. “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.”
— Haruki Murakami

152. “So many dreams, so many disappointments, so many promises. And in the end, they all just vanish.”
— Haruki Murakami

153. “It’s easy to forget things you don’t need anymore.”
— Haruki Murakami

154. “In the end, we all die anyway.”
— Haruki Murakami

155. “Have you ever had that feeling – that you’d like to go to a whole different place and become a whole different self?”
— Haruki Murakami

156. “Even if we could turn back, we’d probably never end up where we started.”
— Haruki Murakami

157. “Music brings a warm glow to my vision, thawing mind and muscle from their endless wintering.”
— Haruki Murakami

158. “Maybe working on the little things as dutifully and honestly as we can is how we stay sane when the world is falling apart.”
— Haruki Murakami

159. “Inside that darkness, i saw rain falling on the sea. Rain softly falling on a vast sea, with no one there to see it. The rain strikes the surface of the sea, yet even the fish don’t know it is raining.”
— Haruki Murakami

160. “Taking crazy things seriously is a serious waste of time.”
— Haruki Murakami

161. “Most everything you think you know about me is nothing more than memories.”
— Haruki Murakami

162. “Find me now. Before someone else does.”
— Haruki Murakami

163. “Anyone who falls in love is searching for the missing pieces of themselves. So anyone who’s in love gets sad when they think of their lover. It’s like stepping back inside a room you have fond memories of, one you haven’t seen in a long time.”
— Haruki Murakami

164. “Loving another person is a wonderful thing, and if that love is sincere, no one ends up tossed into a labyrinth. You have to have more faith in yourself.”
— Haruki Murakami

165. “I think I’ll stay alive here a bit longer, and see with my own eyes what’s going to happen. I can still die after that – it won’t be too late. Probably.”
— Haruki Murakami

166. “There are many things we only see clearly in retrospect.”
— Haruki Murakami

167. “It seemed to me that this world has a serious shortage of both logic and kindness.”
— Haruki Murakami

168. “Life: I’ll never understand it.”
— Haruki Murakami

169. “Narrow minds devoid of imagination. Intolerance, theories cut off from reality, empty terminology, usurped ideals, inflexible systems. Those are the things that really frighten me. What I absolutely fear and loathe.”
— Haruki Murakami

170. “I think that my job is to observe people and the world, and not to judge them. I always hope to position myself away from so-called conclusions. I would like to leave everything wide open to all the possibilities in the world.”
— Haruki Murakami

171. “Life is so uncertain: you never know what could happen.”
— Haruki Murakami

172. “It’s hard to tell the difference between sea and sky, between voyager and sea. Between reality and the workings of the heart.”
— Haruki Murakami

173. “If you’re young and talented, it’s like you have wings.”
— Haruki Murakami

174. “Life is not like water. Things in life don’t necessarily flow over the shortest possible route.”
— Haruki Murakami

175. “I just feel pain. A lot of pain. I thought I could imagine how much this would hurt but I was wrong.”
— Haruki Murakami

176. “What you see with your eyes is not necessarily real.”
— Haruki Murakami

177. “We’re all kind of weird and twisted and drowning.”
— Haruki Murakami

178. “Long after the firefly had disappeared, the trail of its light remained inside me, its pale, faint glow hovering on and on in the thick darkness behind my eyelids like a lost soul. More than once I tried stretching my hand out in the dark. My fingers touched nothing. The faint glow remained, just beyond my grasp.”
— Haruki Murakami

179. “In traveling, a companion, in life, compassion.”
— Haruki Murakami

180. “A gentleman is someone who does not what he wants to do, but what he should do.”
— Haruki Murakami

181. “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.”
— Haruki Murakami

182. “It’s like a kid standing at the window watching the rain.”
— Haruki Murakami

183. “At least he never walked.”
— Haruki Murakami

184. “Sometimes taking time is actually a shortcut.”
— Haruki Murakami

185. “I would never see her again, except in memory. She was here, and now she’s gone. There is no middle ground. Probably is a word that you may find south of the border. But never, ever west of the sun.”
— Haruki Murakami

186. “I am a flawed human being – a far more flawed human being than you realize.”
— Haruki Murakami

187. “Exerting yourself to the fullest within your individual limits: that’s the essence of running, and a metaphor for life.”
— Haruki Murakami

188. “My grandpa always said asking a question is embarrassing for a moment, but not asking is embarrassing for a lifetime.”
— Haruki Murakami

189. “I have a million things to talk to you about. All I want in this world is you. I want to see you and talk. I want the two of us to begin everything from the beginning.”
— Haruki Murakami

190. “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.”
— Haruki Murakami

191. “You have to dream intentionally. Most people dream a dream when they are asleep. But to be a writer, you have to dream while you are awake, intentionally.”
— Haruki Murakami

192. “You are 27 or 28 right? It is very tough to live at that age. When nothing is sure. I have sympathy with you.”
— Haruki Murakami

193. “There are ways of dying that don’t end in funerals. Types of death you can’t smell.”
— Haruki Murakami

194. “Never let the darkness or negativity outside affect your inner self. Just wait until morning comes and the bright light will drown out the darkness.”
— Haruki Murakami

195. “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.”
— Haruki Murakami

196. “Death is not the opposite of life but an innate part of it. By living our lives, we nurture death.”
— Haruki Murakami

197. “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.”
— Haruki Murakami

198. “I have this strange feeling that I’m not myself anymore. It’s hard to put into words, but I guess it’s like I was fast asleep, and someone came, disassembled me, and hurriedly put me back together again. That sort of feeling.”
— Haruki Murakami

199. “In a sense, I’m the one who ruined me: I did it myself.”
— Haruki Murakami

200. “I like to read books. I like to listen to music.”
— Haruki Murakami