Haruki Murakami Quotes

It seems like people are all the time making themselves themselves, but they don't really know it. You can only have true vision when you look behind. A person can slide so fast into being something they never really intended. I wonder if you can truly resurrect your own self.

I don't know who I am. But I do know who I'm not. I have occasionally tried playing people I'm definitely not, and that wasn't a very pleasant experience.

I'd reached a point where there was a direct conflict between what I was trying to be and who I really was.

In my early 30s, I started to realise I was avoiding something on a personal level, but also as a writer. I was in denial about who I was, and was trying to be someone who I was not.

You can spend time self-identifying and figuring out what you are on that, but at some point, you just want to be who you are and not walk around telling people.

Josh Billings said, It is not only the most difficult thing to know oneself, but the most inconvenient one, too. Human beings have always employed an enormous variety of clever devices for running away from themselves, and the modern world is particularly rich in such stratagems.

One can only walk so far from one's true self before the bond either snaps, or pulls one back.

I felt at some point that I had nothing to lose, and [laughs] maybe I was wrong. I think, you know, there's always these little autobiographical secrets behind things. I think I was really attacking my earlier self, and this kind of pretentious figure.

I'm who I was waiting for. I didn't make it.

I didn't pay much attention to the whistles and whoops, in fact, I didn't quite hear them. I was full of a strange feeling, as if I were two people. One of them was Norma Jeane from the orphanage who belonged to nobody; the other was someone whose name I didn't know. But I knew where she belonged; she belonged to the ocean and the sky and the whole world.

As we go through life we gradually discover who we are, but the more we discover, the more we lose ourselves.

Sometimes the warrior feels as if he were living two lives at once. 'There is a bridge that links what I do with what I would like to do,' he thinks. Slowly, his dreams take over his everyday life, and then he realises that he is ready for the thing he always wanted. Then all that is needed is a little daring, and his two lives become one.

You had to come back to learn how to lose yourself, to be pilot and stray-witch, Hansel and Gretel in one.

I, who have been so many men in vain, want to be one man, myself alone. From out of a whirlwind the voice of God replied: I am not, either. I dreamed the world the way you dreamed your work, my Shakespeare: one of the forms of my dream was you, who, like me, are many and one.

You’ve been assigned an identity since birth. Then you spend the rest of your life walking around in it to see if it really fits. You try on all these different selves and abandon just as many. But really it’s about dismantling all that false armor, getting down to what’s real. -Going Bovine

Perhaps, as we say in America, I wanted to find myself. This is an interesting phrase, not current as far as I know in the language of any other people, which certainly does not mean what it says but betrays a nagging suspicion that something has been misplaced. I think now that if I had any intimation that the self I was going to find would turn out to be only the same self from which I had spent so much time in flight, I would have stayed at home.

I wouldn't mind leaving myself behind if I could, but I don't know the way out.

For a long time I thought I knew for sure who I was. I grew up in New Orleans and became a comedian. And there was everything that came along with that. The nightclubs. The smoking. The drinking. Then I turned 13.

For years, copying other people, I tried to know myself. From within, I couldn't decide what to do. Unable to see, I heard my name being called. Then I walked outside.

Before we can realize who we really are, we must become conscious of the fact that the person we think we are, here and now, is at best an impostor and a stranger.

I am not at all the sort of person you and I took me for.

This journey has always been about reaching your own other shore no matter what it is, and that dream continues.

My epiphany came in that police cell: I realised I was about to lose everything and it didn't bother me, not in the slightest. I'd come to hate cycling because I blamed it for the lie I was living.

I'm on the path to being someone I'm equally terrified by and obsessed with. My true self.

I look at that person and I'm like, That's not Kelli White. That's not who I am, who I started out to be.