Haruki Murakami Quotes

I'm not very interested in people. I recognize it in myself - there is a basic indifference toward people.

I just knew I was different from everyone else. I still feel like that today, sitting in rooms with people.

Strangers are an endangered species.

In short, whoever you may be, To this conclusion you'll agree, When every one is somebodee, Then no one's anybody!

Suppose the looking glass smashes, the image disappears, and the romantic figure with the green of forest depths all about it is there no longer, but only that shell of a person which is seen by other people - what an airless, shallow, bald, prominent world it becomes! A world not to be lived in. As we face each other in omnibuses and underground railways we are looking into the mirror that accounts for the vagueness, the gleam of glassiness, in our eyes.

Freedom so often means that one isn't needed anywhere. Here you are an individual, you have a background of your own, you would be missed. But off there in the cities there are thousands of rolling stones like me. We are all alike; we have no ties, we know nobody, we own nothing.

She was not an existence, an experience, a passion, a structure of sensations, to anybody but herself. To all humankind besides Tess was only a passing thought. Even to friends she was no more than a frequently passing thought.

People talking without speaking,/ People listening without hearing...Sounds of Silence.

I don't know if I get recognized necessarily, though I do get looked at a lot - but I don't know if it's because of who I am, or if people just think I look weird.

I have always written about characters who fall somewhere in the spectrum between solitary and totally alienated.

Nobody notices me. Nobody thinks I'm me. But then I look less like me than most of the people coming to our concerts.

It's the differences in people that help you realize who you are. Even if we silently pass each other on the street.

I'm nobody, who are you?

Nobody knows me.

I don't associate myself with anything. I don't associate myself with where I'm from or where I am.

I walked around the block twice, passed 200 people and failed to see a human being.

Anybody can be nobody; but it takes a man to be somebody.

It was so easy to disown what you couldn't recognize, to keep yourself apart from things that were foreign and unsettling. The only person you can be sure to control, always, is yourself. Which is a lot to be sure of, but at the same time, not enough.

I guess I always think of myself as more of the people. I always feel like a bit of an outsider.

Welcome to New York, where everybody's a stranger, and nobody is.

But 'midst the crowd, the hum, the shock of men, To hear, to see, to feel, and to possess, And roam along, the world's tired denizen, With none who bless us, none whom we can bless.

You can forget who you are if you're alone too much.

I felt as if I was the only person awake in a city of sleepwalkers. That's an illusion, of course. When you walk through a crowd of strangers it's next door to impossible not to imagine that they're all waxworks, but probably they're thinking just the same about you.

It has been strange to me to return to life and to feel that I have any sympathy with human beings, after the long interval of quiet and indifference which succeeded my marriage.

You were one person alive and your brain was encased in a skull. There were other people out there. It took effort to be connected.