Haruki Murakami Quotes

I always considered myself a loner. I mean, not like a poor-me, Byron-esque, I-should-have-brought-a-swimming-buddy loner. I mean the sort of person who doesn’t feel too upset about the prospect of a weekend spent seeing no one, and reading good books on the couch. It wasn’t like I was a people hater or anything. I enjoyed activities and the company of friends. But they were a side dish. I always thought I would be happy without them.

Not that she objected to solitude. Quite the contrary. She had books, thank Heaven, quantities of books. All sorts of books.

When I read books it's to escape. It's so I don't have to talk to people.

Every book is an image of solitude. It is a tangible object that one can pick up, put down, open, and close, and its words represent many months if not many years, of one man’s solitude, so that with each word one reads in a book one might say to himself that he is confronting a particle of that solitude

It is a most wonderful comfort to sit alone beneath a lamp, book spread before you, and commune with someone from the past whom you have never met.

One of the things I enjoy most is to be left alone with a book.

It is thanks to my evening reading alone that I am still more or less sane.

He would go somewhere no one knew him, and he would sit in a library all day and read books and listen to people breathing.

Introverts are offered keys to private gardens full of riches. To possess such a key is to tumble like Alice down her rabbit hole. She didn't choose to go to Wonderland - but she made of it an adventure that was fresh and fantastic and very much her own.

Books. I'd probably spend all my time alone and lost in books if I could. It's easier that way.

I wished I could be alone in my room, with my books, away from these people.

I prefer to be left alone with my books.

A man who finishes a book is always alone when he finishes it.

Solitude desolates me; company oppresses me.

Be a loner. That gives you time to wonder.

If only they would all just leave me alone with my books and my letters, I would be content to let life, and the world pass me by

Give me a bed and a book and I am happy.

Heaven, Kiwi thought, would be the reading room of a great library. But it would be private. Cozy. You wouldn't have to worry about some squeaky-shoed librarian turning the lights off on you or gauging your literacy by reading the names on your book spines, and there wouldn't be a single other patron. The whole place would hum with a library's peace, filtering softly over you like white bars of light.

One day I shall write a little book of conduct myself, and I shall call it Social Problems of the Unsociable. And the root problem, beneath a hundred varying manifestions, is How to Escape. How to escape, that is, at those times, be they few or frequent, when you want to keep yourself to yourself.

Books swept me away, this way and that, one after the other; I made endless vows according to their lights for I believed them.

I spend a lot of time alone and my wife understands that I need to be alone. I enjoy being alone. But I'm never lonely.

I love the solitude of reading. I love the deep dive into someone else's story, the delicious ache of a last page.

I'm a private person, a shy person. Sometimes, reading for eleven hours straight feels to me like the perfect way to spend a day.

I'd go somewhere where no one spoke. I would take a stack of books up to my hips, and I'd read nonstop. And I'd be reading naked.

Reading fiction is important. It is a vital means of imagining a life other than our own, which in turn makes us more empathetic beings. Following complex story lines stretches our brains beyond the 140 characters of sound-bite thinking, and staying within the world of a novel gives us the ability to be quiet and alone, two skills that are disappearing faster than the polar icecaps.