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Ryu Murakami Quotes | Quotes said by Ryu Murakami

  • Ryu Murakami Quote #1

    ...having nothing better to do, meandered off to a coffee shop and sat facing each other for a couple of hours, neither of them talking much but each coming to the general conclusion that the other was a person rather like himself...


  • Ryu Murakami Quote #2

    After listening to a lot of these stories, I began to think that American loneliness is a completely different creature from anything we experience in this country, and it made me glad I was born Japanese. The type of loneliness where you need to keep struggling to accept a situation is fundamentally different from the sort you know you'll get through if you just hang in there.

  • Ryu Murakami Quote #3

    And sometimes ignorance is even harder to deal with than deliberate evil.

  • Ryu Murakami Quote #4

    But sometimes things happen that no one hopes for. Events that cause everything you've worked towards, the life you've carefully constructed piece by piece, to come tumbling down all around you. No one is to blame, but you're left with a wound you can't heal on your own and can't believe you'll ever learn to accept, so you struggle to escape the pain. Only time can heal wounds as deep as that - a lot of time - and all you can really do is place yourself in its hands and try to consider the passing of each day a victory. You tough it out moment by moment, hour by hour, and after some weeks or months you begin to see signs of recovery. Slowly the wound heals into a scar.

  • Ryu Murakami Quote #5

    But what I did sense was an emptiness like a black hole inside of him, and there was no predicting what might emerge from a place like that.

  • Ryu Murakami Quote #6

    But why is it that if you imagine a baby who smells of milk, for example, you can't help smiling? Why is there such an agreement around the world about what is or isn't a foul smell? Who decided what smells bad? Is it impossible that somewhere in this world there are people who, if they sat next to a homeless fellow they'd get the urge to snuggle up to him, but if they sat next to a baby they'd get an urge to kill it?

  • Ryu Murakami Quote #7

    Children would struggle desperately to feel love for their parents. Rather than hate a parent, in fact, they'd choose to hate themselves. Love and violence became so intertwined for them that when they grew up and got into relationships, only hysteria could set their hearts at ease.

  • Ryu Murakami Quote #8

    Every one of a hundred thousand cities around the world had its own special sunset and it was worth going there, just once, if only to see the sun go down.

  • Ryu Murakami Quote #9

    Every time he studied this instrument, with its slender, gleaming steel rod that tapered down to such needle-like sharpness, he wondered why it was necessary to have things like this in the world. If it were truly only for chopping ice, you'd think a completely different design might do. The people who produce and sell things like this don't understand, he thought. They don't realize that some of us break out in a cold sweat at just a glimpse of that shiny, pointed tip.

  • Ryu Murakami Quote #10

    I remembered reading in a hard-boiled detective novel that if you drink in the same place two nights in a row, the bartender and waiters will remember your face.

  • Ryu Murakami Quote #11

    I wonder why people you have to meet have to be such liars. They lie as if their lives depended on it.

  • Ryu Murakami Quote #12

    If everyone could feel as I felt at that moment, dressed in my preppy sweater and McGregor coat and about to set out on a little journey with my Bambi-eyed girlfriend on Christmas Eve, all conflicts in the world would vanish. Mellow smiles would rule the earth.

  • Ryu Murakami Quote #13

    It was the face of a human being who’d been constructed exclusively of wounds. Not time or history or ambition, nothing but wounds. The face of a person who could probably kill someone without feeling anything whatsoever.

  • Ryu Murakami Quote #14

    Memories are't like words; they're soft and gooey. Covered with a sticky slime, like a penis after sex, or your vagina when you menstruate, and shaped like tadpoles or tiny watersnakes

  • Ryu Murakami Quote #15

    No forgiveness for lies.

  • Ryu Murakami Quote #16

    Oba-sans, to put it in somewhat difficult terms, are life-forms that have stopped evolving. And anyone can turn into an Oba-san. Young women, of course, but even young men, even middle-aged men —even children. You turn into an Oba-san the instant you lose the will to evolve.

  • Ryu Murakami Quote #17

    People were infected with the concept that happiness was something outside themselves, and a new and powerful form of loneliness was born. Mix loneliness with stress and enervation, and all sorts of madness can occur. Anxiety increases, and in order to obliterate the anxiety, people turn to extreme sex, violence, and even murder.

  • Ryu Murakami Quote #18

    That was with me for years--feeling I wasn't myself. And I do think I wasn't my real self then. Of course, I'm not sure there is such a thing as a real self. You could ransack your innards looking for the real you and never find it--slice yourself open and all you'll find is blood and muscle and bone.

  • Ryu Murakami Quote #19

    That's when he hit her, when he saw how scared she was. He couldn't bear it that she was frightened and asking for help. Asking for help is wrong. Because there isn't any such thing as help in this world.

  • Ryu Murakami Quote #20

    That’s what violence was: emotion leaking out from consciousness into the physical world, linking up with the muscles of the arms and shoulders and diaphragm and, inevitably, the face. Stifle emotion during an act of violence and the face becomes a blank, unreadable mask.

  • Ryu Murakami Quote #21

    There were little girls who would snuggle up to any grown man and try to guide his hand inside their underwear, and there were kids who compulsively bit their own arms. Kids who would suddenly start twitching and banging their heads against a wall, not even stopping when the blood ran down their faces. Kids who waddled around oblivious to the stinking load in their own pants. Watching children like this, it was all too easy to see why their parents beat them. It was only natural to hate such kids, to ignore them and shower only your other children with love. Who wouldn't? But of course that wasn't the way it really worked. Such behaviors weren't the reasons parents abused children, but the results of abuse. Children are powerless. No matter how viciously they're beaten, children were powerless to do anything about it. Even if Mother hit them with a shoehorn or the hose of a vacuum cleaner or the handle of a kitchen knife, or strangled them or poured boiling water on them, they couldn't escape her; they couldn't even truly despise her. Children would struggle desperately to feel love for their parents. Rather than hate a parent, in fact, they'd choose to hate themselves. Love and violence became so intertwined for them that when they grew up and got into relationships, only hysteria could set their hearts at ease. Kindness, gentleness - anything along those lines just caused tension, since there was no telling when it would turn to overt hostility.

  • Ryu Murakami Quote #22

    These young men, in other words, represented a variety of types, but one thing they had in common was that they'd all given up on committing positively to anything in life. This was not their fault, however. The blame lay with a certain ubiquitous spirit of the times, transmitted to them by their respective mothers. And perhaps it goes without saying that this spirit of the times was in fact an oppressive value system based primarily upon the absolute certainty that nothing in this world was ever going to change.

  • Ryu Murakami Quote #23

    They needed a reason why a little kid would commit murder, someone or something to point the finger at, and I think they were relieved when they hit upon horror movies as the culprit. But there's no reason a child commits murder, just as there's no reason a child gets lost. What would it be - because his parents weren't watching him? That's not a reason, it's just a step in the process.

  • Ryu Murakami Quote #24

    This was a factory, a sorting house. We were no different from dogs and pigs and cows: all of us were allowed to play when we were small, but then, just before reaching maturity, we were sorted and classified. Being a high school student was the first step toward becoming a domestic animal.

  • Ryu Murakami Quote #25

    To distort our faces with joy, or wail and weep with sorrow, or collapse in agony, or wallow in sentimentality – wasn’t an inviolable human trait but something we can lose simply by leading dull and dreary lives. ‘A rich emotional life,’ she’d written, ‘is a privilege reserved only for the daring few’.

  • Ryu Murakami Quote #26

    TV sounds are all the same; there's no difference between the sound of the wind in Northern Ireland and the wind on a Polynesian island.

  • Ryu Murakami Quote #27

    What makes somebody nice or unpleasant to be around is the way they communicate. When people are fucked up, their communication is fucked up.

  • Ryu Murakami Quote #28

    When I went on anyway, my body began to grow cold, and I thought I
    was dead. Face pale, my dead self sat down on a bench and began to turn
    toward my real self, who was watching this hallucination on the screen of the
    night. My dead self came nearer, just as if it might want to shake hands with my
    real self. That's when I panicked and tried to run. But my dead self pursued me
    and finally caught me, entered me and controlled me. I'd felt then just the way I
    felt now. I felt as if a hole had opened in my head from which consciousness
    and memory leaked out and in their place the rash crowded in, and a cold like
    spoiled roast chicken. But that time before, shaking and clinging to the damp
    bench, I'd told myself, Hey, take a good look, isn't the world still under your
    feet? I'm on this ground, and on this same ground are trees and grass and ants
    carrying sand to their nests, little girls chasing rolling balls, and puppies running.

  • Ryu Murakami Quote #29

    When you're in an extreme situation you tend to avoid facing it by getting caught up in little details. Like a guy who's decided to commit suicide and boards a train only to become obsessed with whether he remembered to lock the door when he left home.

  • Ryu Murakami Quote #30

    Who hasn't wanted to die at one time or another?

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