63 Quotes by Ryū Murakami

when beautiful women get angry, it scares people. Ugly women get mad and it’s just comical, right?

Every time he studied this instrument, with its slender, gleaming steel rod that tapered down to such needle-like sharpness, he wondered why it was necessary to have things like this in the world. If it were truly only for chopping ice, you'd think a completely different design might do. The people who produce and sell things like this don't understand, he thought. They don't realize that some of us break out in a cold sweat at just a glimpse of that shiny, pointed tip.

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.

Good poets are those able to gaze into the darkness of their own hearts. A vivid or beautiful poem is not necessarily a good poem. Poetry that doesn’t stand side by side with the reader has no real power.

Words are just tools we use to express or communicate something. Or no, they’re not even tools, they’re more like means to an end. Maybe words are like money. Money’s just a tool for transactions, right? What’s important is the thing you buy with the money, not the money itself.

The instant you put something like that into words, it was gone. Words and combinations of words - the more you relied on them, the less power you actually had.

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.

..any pop song in this particular country, when sung by several citizens at once, tended to turn into a mindless celebration devoid of any genuine sense of melancholy.

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.