Haruki Murakami Quotes

I feel that one of the most important lessons that can be learned is that what we "see" may be different than what is actually in front of us.

They say life is all about connecting, like that's a good thing. But when brain and eyes are lining up you know different.

Things are always different from what they might be.

Life is not always what we think it is.

Nothing, of course, begins at the time you think it did.

They tease me now, telling me it was only a dream. But does it matter whether it was a dream or reality, if the dream made known to me the truth?

The truths that seem most truthful, if you look at them from all sides, if you look at them close up, turn out to be either half truths or lies.

I'm interested in such things as the difference between how we perceive the world and what the world turns out to be. The difference is between the stories we tell others and the stories we tell ourselves. There is a wonderful Russian saying, which I use as the epigraph of one of my novels, which goes, He lies like an eyewitness. Which is very sly, clever and true.

Nothing is as good as it seems and nothing is as bad, but somewhere between reality falls.

A novel is balanced between a few true impressions and the multitude of false ones that make up most of what we call life.

I realize that nothing's as it seems.

Reality seems so simple. We just open our eyes and there it is. But that doesn't mean it is simple.

Appearances are a glimpse of the unseen.

As a son of a man who pretended to be one thing for 33 years of my life and then was another thing, the questions of 'what is real' and 'what is not real' are very blurrily vivid to me.

What Youth deemed crystal, Age finds out was dew.

We live in a fantasy world, a world of illusion. The great task in life is to find reality.

Reality is an acquired taste.

Look! Don't be deceived by appearances - men and things are not what they seem. All who are not on the rock are in the sea!

From a distance it is something; and nearby it is nothing.

I understand the difference between perception and reality.

Everything you see is not always real.

Perception is not always reality.

Sometimes what we see, what's going on in front of us, isn't really what's happening.

The real world is much smaller than the imaginary

Things are NEVER what they seem, Pa, I thought. I used to think they were, but I was wrong or stupid or blind or something. Old folks are forever complaining about their failing eyesight, but I think your vision gets better as you get older. Mine surely was.