My Top 15 Murakami Quotes

I love Haruki Murakami´s books. I have never encountered another author with a writing style like his. I once read, he simply intended to write his thoughts down to create a story. But his sentences were too complicated in Japanese, so he wrote his book in English and translated it afterwards into Japanese.

If you aren´t familiar with Murakami´s literature yet, let me tell you, that you´ll read about books, good music, coffee, cats and crazy sex.

Once, I tried reading the French version of „Kafka On The Shore“ to improve my French skills. When I reached the part in the story, when Murakami let fish rain down onto the streets, I was thinking: „Oh dear, I always knew my French wasn´t that good, but raining fish? Seriously? I must have terribly misunderstood something…“. So what did I do? I bought the English edition an reread it – only to figure out, that I didn´t misunderstand the vocabulary in the first place… It was really raining fish.

You can imagine, I laughed a lot and was immediately hooked on his books and craved for more weird fiction with raining fishes.

With this blog entry, I´d love to share my favorite Murakami quotes with you.

 

„If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking.“ (Norwegian Wood)

„A gentleman is someone who does not what he wants to do but what he should do.“ (Norwegian Wood)

„Letters are just pieces of paper. Burn them, and what stays in your heart will stay; keep them and what vanishes will vanish.“ (Norwegian Wood)

„No matter how far you run. Distance might not solve anything.“ (Kafka On The Shore)

„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 is all about.“ (Kafka On The Shore)

„It looked to her like her own soul being sucked into the other side of a mirror.“ (Sputnik Sweetheart)

„It was an impressive sight, something I wanted to clip out with scissors and pin to the wall of my memory.“ ( Sputnik Sweetheart)

„No matter how far you travel, you can never get away from yourself. It´s like your shadow. It follows you everywhere.“ (After The Quake)

„It was only a dream, he says. Dreams come from the past, not from the future. Dreams shouldn´t control you – you should control them.“ ( The Ice Man)

„You said that the mind is like the wind, but perhaps it is we who are like the wind. Knowing nothing, simply blowing through. Never aging, never dying.“ (Hard-Boiled Wonderland And The End Of The World)

„My late grandmother used to say, ´People with dark hearts have dark dreams. Those whose hearts are even darker can´t dream at all.`“ (Hear The Wind Sing)

„Each day was a carbon copy of the last. You needed a bookmark to tell one from the other.“ (Pinball)

„Her face had no expression, like a photograph of a sunken city on the ocean floor.“ (A Wild Sheep Chase)

„Your fate is and will always be the fate of a dreamer.“ (A Wild Sheep Chase)

„(…) a fire can be any shape it wants to be. It´s free. So it can look like anything at all depending on what´s inside the person looking at it. If you get this deep, quiet kind of feeling when you look at a fire, that´s because it´s showing you the deep, quiet kind of feeling you have inside yourself.“ (After The Quake)

 

I´ve read all of Murakami´s book so far, so I keep on waiting for new releases.

I´m studying Japanese at university, so I also attempt to read his books in Japanese from time to time. The sentence patterns are quite easy to understand as a foreigner, but he uses so many vocabulary fields that I struggle with the text from time to time. So far, a Japanese version of my raining-fish-incident didn´t occur yet – but maybe only because I already read all of his work.

If you didn’t check out his books yet, I´d highly recommend it 🙂