Haruki Murakami Quotes

You can know the whole world and still feel lost in it.

Just having the pain of being alive without anything else, whether it's good or bad. There's a lot of serious songs on the record, you know. That song is just about feeling like a fish out of water, feeling like you don't belong on the planet sometimes.

I am in truth the Steppenwolf that I often call myself; that beast astray that finds neither home nor joy nor nourishment in a world that is strange and incomprehensible to him.

The only place you belong is the place you can never go back. And so yer always alone, forever and always.

I wandered off, walking through streets that seemed emptier than ever, thinking that if I didn't stop, if I kept on walking, I wouldn't notice that the world I thought I knew was no longer there.

We live on top of the created world, I think to myself, not in it.

I felt that I was not, never had been and never would be a living part of this overpoweringly solid and deeply meaningful world around me.

Yes, there is no denying it, any longer, it is not you who are dead, but all the others. So you get up and go to your mother, who thinks she is alive. That's my impression. But now I shall have to get myself out of this ditch. How joyfully I would vanish here, sinking deeper and deeper under the rains.

We are forlorn like children, and experienced like old men, we are crude and sorrowful and superficial—I believe we are lost.

These days I must take the world in small and carefully measured doses. It is a sort of homeopathic cure I am undergoing, though I am not certain what this cure is meant to mend. Perhaps I am learning to live amongst the living again. Practising, I mean. But no, that is not it. Being here is just a way of not being anywhere.

In a universe suddenly divested of illusion and lights, man feels an alien, a stranger. His exile is without remedy since he is deprived of the memory of a lost home or the hope of a promised land.

Alone in a world, With millions of souls Walking in circles Trapped in their dreams unhealthy, unclean walking in circles, now do not disturb scream in silence everyone's sleeping

There is a chasm between me and the world outside of me. A gap so wide my feelings can't cross it. By the time my screams reach the other side, they have dwindled into groans.

All the books on my shelves, when I would go to them to look for help with my anguish, they all just seemed so crass. They didn't get it. Those books don't understand. Nobody understands. The universe, nobody understands my agony, or my questioning, and it's this shift in what in the world around us could possibly be meaningful or helpful.

All of a sudden I didn't fit in anywhere. Not at school, not at home...and every time I turned around, another person I'd known forever felt like a stranger to me. Even I felt like a stranger to me.

I don't belong. Not here. Not now. I have to get back there. The bet was rigged, he made me believe. Now there's darkness in my soul. I want to die . . . again. But I choose to come back, why?

I couldn’t be with people and I didn’t want to be alone. Suddenly my perspective whooshed and I was far out in space, watching the world. I could see millions and millions of people, all slotted into their lives; then I could see me—I’d lost my place in the universe. It had closed up and there was nowhere for me to be. I was more lost than I had known it was possible for any human being to be.

Sometimes I think I am going mad. I live for days in the mystery and tears of things so that the commonest object, the most familiar face- even my own- become ghostly, unreal, enigmatic. I get into an attitude of almost total scepticism, nescience, solipsism, in a world of dumb, sphinx-like things that cannot explain themselves. The discovery of how I am situated- a sentient being on a globe in space overshadows me. I wish I were just nothing.

I had dropped one form and not taken on the other, and was become like Mohammed's coffin in our legend, with a resultant feeling of intense loneliness in life, and a contempt, not for other men, but for all they do.

I don't know what I am thinking. But I am alone. I am trapped in the net of the room. In the net of humans. I think maybe I am drowning in the net of humans.

I feel myself shriveling along with my world, getting smaller and harder. I'm turning into a rock, and in some ways that's good, because rocks last forever. But if this is how I'm going to last forever, then I don't want to.

Wind and storm colored July. Also, in the middle, cadaverous, awful, lay the grey puddle in the courtyard, when holding an envelope in my hand, I carried a message. I came to the puddle. I could not cross it. Identity failed me. We are nothing, I said, and fell. I was blown like a feather. I was wafted down tunnels. Then very gingerly, I pushed my foot across. I laid my hand against a brick wall. I returned very painfully, drawing myself back into my body over the grey, cadaverous space of the puddle. This is life then to which I am committed.

The living have never shown me how to live.

Why did God make me an outcast and a stranger in mine own house? The shades of the prison-house closed round about us all: walls strait and stubborn to the whitest, but relentlessly narrow, tall, and unscalable to sons of night who must plod darkly on in resignation, or beat unavailing palms against the stone, or steadily, half hopelessly, watch the streak of blue above.

I'm not sure this is a world I belong in anymore. I'm not sure that I want to wake up.