Ryū Murakami > Quotes

“Every one of a hundred thousand cities around the world had its own special sunset and it was worth going there, just once, if only to see the sun go down.”
― Ryu Murakami, Coin Locker Babies

“People who love horror films are people with boring lives... when a really scary movie is over, you're reassured to see that you're still alive and the world still exists as it did before. That's the real reason we have horror films - they act as shock absorbers - and if they disappeared altogether, I bet you'd see a big leap in the number of serial killers. After all, anyone stupid enough to get the idea of murdering people from a movie could get the same idea from watching the news.”
― Ryu Murakami, In the Miso Soup

“... The type of loneliness where you need to keep struggling to accept a situation is fundamentally different than the sort you know you'll get through if you just hang in there”
― Ryu Murakami, In the Miso Soup

“Everybody wants to talk about themselves, and everybody wants to hear everybody else's story, so we take turns playing reporter and celebrity.”
― Ryu Murakami

“Parents, teachers, government - they all teach you how to live the dreary, deadening life of a slave, but nobody teaches you how to live normally.”
― Ryū Murakami, In the Miso Soup

“She's like smoke:you think you're seeing her clearly enough,but when you reach for her there's nothing there”
― Ryu Murakami

“They don't realise that they've changed; they think it's the world that changed.”
― ryu murakami, Coin Locker Babies

“All Americans have something lonely about them. I don't know what the reason might be, except maybe that they're all descended from immigrants.”
― Ryū Murakami, In the Miso Soup

“When you're in an extreme situation you tend to avoid facing it by getting caught up in little details. Like a guy who's decided to commit suicide and boards a train only to become obsessed with whether he remembered to lock the door when he left home.”
― Ryū Murakami, In the Miso Soup

“And sometimes ignorance is even harder to deal with than deliberate evil.”
― Ryū Murakami, In the Miso Soup

“Malevolence is born of negative feelings like loneliness and sadness and anger. It comes from an emptiness inside you that feels as if it's been carved out with a knife, an emptiness you're left with when something very important has been taken away from you”
― Ryu Murakami

“Just before I fell asleep, I had a moment of panic ...”
― Ryu Murakami, In the Miso Soup

“Yeah, he'd said, maybe it's just my idea, but really it always hurts, the times it don't hurt is when we just forget, we just forget it hurts, you know, it's not just because my belly's all rotten, everybody always hurts. So when it really starts stabbing me, somehow I feel sort of peaceful, like I'm myself again.”
― Ryū Murakami, Almost Transparent Blue

“Words themselves aren't that important. Even if somebody says words that shock you, or make you want to kill them, or make you tremble with emotion, the words themselves you tend to forget in time. Words are just tools we use to express or communicate something.”
― Ryū Murakami, Popular Hits of the Showa Era

“There in that pool stained with green blood, he had learned two things: one was that all the pain stopped when you stopped fighting death; and the other was that as long as you could still hear your heart beating, you had to keep fighting back.”
― Ryū Murakami, Coin Locker Babies

“It was the face of a human being who’d been constructed exclusively of wounds. Not time or history or ambition, nothing but wounds. The face of a person who could probably kill someone without feeling anything whatsoever.”
― Ryu Murakami , Audition

“People were infected with the concept that happiness was something outside themselves, and a new and powerful form of loneliness was born.”
― Ryū Murakami, Audition: A Novel

“When you're a kid, getting lost isn't just an event or a situation, it's like a career move. You get this thrill of anxiety and fear and a feeling that you've done something that can never be undone.”
― Ryū Murakami, In the Miso Soup

“What makes somebody nice or unpleasant to be around is the way they communicate. When people are fucked up, their communication is fucked up.”
― Ryū Murakami, In the Miso Soup

“That was with me for years--feeling I wasn't myself. And I do think I wasn't my real self then. Of course, I'm not sure there is such a thing as a real self. You could ransack your innards looking for the real you and never find it--slice yourself open and all you'll find is blood and muscle and bone.”
― Ryū Murakami, In the Miso Soup

“Who knew there were still people like that in this world, though? Everybody wants to talk about themselves, and everybody wants to hear everybody else's story, so we take turns playing reporter and celebrity. 'It must have made you very sad when your own father raped you - can you describe some of your feelings at the time? Yes, I wept and wept, wonder why something like this had to happen to me'. It's like that. Everyone's running around comparing wounds, like bodybuilders showing off their muscles. And what's really unbelievable is that they really believe they can heal the wounds like that, just by putting them on display.”
― Ryu Murakami, Piercing

“The world's worst flavor combination was mango and menthol.”
― Ryu Murakami, Coin Locker Babies

“Very few people of our generation or the next will reach adulthood without experiencing the sort of unhappiness you can't really deal with on your own. We're still in the minority, so the media lump us together as "The Oversensitive Young", or whatever the latest catchphrase is, but eventually that will change.”
― Ryū Murakami, In the Miso Soup

“The young people
nowadays – men and women, amateurs and pros – generally fall
into one of two categories: either they don’t know what it is
that’s most important to them, or they know but don’t have the
power to go after it. But this girl’s different. She knows what’s
most important to her and she knows how to get it, but she
doesn’t let on what it is. I’m pretty sure it’s not money, or
success, or a normal happy life, or a strong man, or some weird
religion, but that’s about all I can tell you. She’s like smoke: you
think you’re seeing her clearly enough, but when you reach for
her there’s nothing there. That’s a sort of strength, I suppose.
But it makes her hard to figure out.”
― Ryū Murakami, Audition

“This was a factory, a sorting house. We were no different from dogs and pigs and cows: all of us were allowed to play when we were small, but then, just before reaching maturity, we were sorted and classified. Being a high school student was the first step toward becoming a domestic animal.”
― Ryū Murakami, 69

“But what I did sense was an emptiness like a black hole inside of him, and there was no predicting what might emerge from a place like that.”
― Ryū Murakami, In the Miso Soup

“They needed a reason why a little kid would commit murder, someone or something to point the finger at, and I think they were relieved when they hit upon horror movies as the culprit. But there's no reason a child commits murder, just as there's no reason a child gets lost. What would it be - because his parents weren't watching him? That's not a reason, it's just a step in the process.”
― Ryū Murakami, In the Miso Soup

“A person without self-confidence is incapable of being independent, and people who are dependent on their partners always create unhappiness. Always.”
― Ryū Murakami, Audition: A Novel

“And just because I've written this book, don't think I've changed. I'm like I was back then, really.”
― Ryū Murakami, Almost Transparent Blue

“In heated rooms, he often felt the outlines of his body, the border between him and the external world, grow disturbingly fuzzy.”
― Ryū Murakami, Piercing