Quotes by Japanese Authors - Page 5

Once a person has been poisoned by self-deception, he can't make decisions about himself as neatly as all that," Himiko said, elaborating her friend's terrific prophecy; " You won't get a divorce Bird. You'll justify yourself like crazy, and try to salvage your married life by confusing the real issues. A decision like divorce is beyond you now, Bird, the poison has gone to work. And you know how the story ends ? Not even your own wife will trust you absolutely, and one day you'll discover for yourself that your entire private life is in the shadow of deception and in the end you'll destroy yourself. Bird, the first signs of self-destruction have appeared already!" " But that's a blind alley! Leave it to you to paint the most hopeless future you can think of. " Bird lunged at jocularity...
Kenzaburō Ōe
Being with her I feel a pain, like a frozen knife stuck in my chest. An awful pain, but the funny thing is I'm thankful for it. It's like that frozen pain and my very existence ar
Haruki Murakami
But sometimes things happen that no one hopes for. Events that cause everything you've worked towards, the life you've carefully constructed piece by piece, to come tumbling down all around you. No one is to blame, but you're left with a wound you can't heal on your own and can't believe you'll ever learn to accept, so you struggle to escape the pain. Only time can heal wounds as deep as that - a lot of time - and all you can really do is place yourself in its hands and try to consider the passing of each day a victory. You tough it out moment by moment, hour by hour, and after some weeks or months you begin to see signs of recovery. Slowly the wound heals into a scar.
Ryū Murakami
When you listen to someone, you should give up all your preconceived ideas and your subjective opinions; you should just listen to him, just observe what his way is. We put very little emphasis on right and wrong or good and bad. We just see things as they are with him, and accept them. This is how we communicate with each other. Usually when you listen to some statement, you hear it as a kind of echo of yourself. You are actually listening to your own opinion. If it agrees with your opinion you may accept it, but if it does not, you will reject it or you may not even really hear it.
Shunryu Suzuki
You're wrong. The mind is not like raindrops. It does not fall from the skies, it does not lose itself among other things. If you believe in me at all, then believe this: I promise you I will find it. Everything depends on this." "I believe you," she whispers after a moment. "Please find my mind.
Haruki Murakami
How much can you really trust the promise of a suicidal father?
Ruth Ozeki
Every one of us is losing something precious to us. Lost opportunities, lost possibilities, feelings we can never get back again. That’s part of what it means to be alive.
Haruki Murakami
Gentlemen, I like war. Gentlemen, I love war.I like genocide. I like blitzkrieg.I like aggressive war. I like defensive war.I like sieges. I like breaking through.I like withdrawing. I like cleaning up.I like retreating.In moors. On highways. In trenches.In plains. On tundra. In desert.On sea. In sky. In mud.In marshes.I love every aspect of war that takes place on Earth.
Kohta Hirano
Life is a tiring business indeed.Soy sauce runs out. Milk runs out. Dishwashing detergent runs out. Lancôme lipsticks—I thought I had stockpiled several years' worth—run out. Dust underneath the dining table becomes dust balls. Newspapers and magazines pile up, and so does laundry. E-mail and junk mail keep coming. When occasion demands, I make myself presentable and I present myself. I listen to my sister's same old complaints on the phone. I withdraw money for my elderly mother, whose tongue works fine but whose body is a mess. I contact her caseworker. And now I have reached a stage in life when my own health is prone to betray me.
Minae Mizumura
If to be truthful is to be cruel, then lying must surely be an act of kindness. And so, kindness is a lie.
Hikigaya Hachiman
I've learned that from a war ignited by revenge, nothing can be born, but sorrow. - Aladdin
Shinobu Ohtaka
Music brings a warm glow to my vision, thawing mind and muscle from their endless wintering.
Haruki Murakami
--Hero!? Forget it! We're Pirates! I love heroes but I don't wanna become one! Do you even know what it takes to be a Hero!?Lets say you have some meat okay? Now a Pirate would chomp down on that bad boy, but a hero would share it with everyone!! I want to eat meat!""--Hero!? Forget it! We're Pirates! I love heroes but I don't wanna become one! Do you even know what it takes to be a Hero!?Lets say you have some meat okay? Now a Pirate would chomp down on that bad boy, but a hero would share it with everyone!! I want to eat meat!" - Monkey D. Luffy
Eiichirō Oda
Don't kill!...The fly is asking youTo save his lifeBy rubbing his hands together
Kobayashi Issa
I don't know if ghouls are allowed to live either. But there has to be a reason we exist.
Sui Ishida
Now she realized that she was not peering at a so-dark-blue-it-looked-black ocean, but rather she was looking straight through miles of incredibly clear water at something enormous and black in its nethermost depths. Maybe it was the bottom--so deep that not even light could touch it.And yet, down in those impossible depths, she thought she could see tiny lights sparkling. She stared uncertainly at the tiny glimmerings. They seemed almost like scattered grains of sand lit from within; in some places they clustered like colonies, faint and twinkling.Like stars...
Fuyumi Ono
Hearing a crow with no mouthCry in the deepDarkness of the night,I feel a longing forMy father before he was born.
Ikkyu
With people you can never tell, Will they have changed when next we meet? But here in my dear old home at least, The plums still smell as sweet. / 人はいさ 心も知らず ふるさとは 花ぞ昔の 香ににほひける
Fujiwara no Okikaze
The animals known as human beings live in humongous condominium blocks, just going about their daily lives. I've come to realize that it's just a modern jungle. And I'm the girl who's wandered into the forest.
Inio Asano
This is what it means to live on. When granted hope, a person uses it as fuel, as a guidepost to life. It is impossible to live without hope.
Haruki Murakami
Although this may be a most difficult thing, if one will do it, it can be done. There is nothing that one should suppose cannot be done.
Tsunetomo Yamamoto
If animal history has been a history of evolution, then the history of mankind is one of retrogression. Hooray for monsters! Monsters are the great embodiments of the weak.
Kōbō Abe
Memories? Pheh. Those just get in the way of living.
Tsukumizu
I really should have died then, Tsukuru often told himself. Then this world, the one in the here and now, wouldn't exist. It was a captivating, bewitching thought. The present world wouldn't exist, and reality would no longer be real. As far as this world was concerned, he would simply no longer exist—just as this world would no longer exist for him.
Haruki Murakami
No, I don't think I've been defiled. But I haven't been saved, either. There's nobody who can save me right now, Mr. Wind-Up Bird. The world looks totally empty to me. Everything I see around me looks fake. The only thing thay isn't fake is that gooshy thing inside me.
Haruki Murakami
If you are unable to find the truth right where you are, where else do you expect to find it?
Dōgen
He stopped complaining, but now I was annoyed. I went to the roof and drank alone.
Haruki Murakami
The courageous testimony of Dr. Faust that a maiden's smile is more precious than history, philosophy, education, religion, law, politics,economics, and all the other branches of learning. Learning is another name for vanity. It is the effort of human beings not to be human beings.
Osamu Dazai
I want to live. Doesn't everyone feel the same way?
Yua Kotegawa
When he saw the vista of the street reflected in the mirror in which he was looking, he was terror stricken. He had the impression that the whole view had turned into eyes that reproached him.
Kōbō Abe
God against man. Man against God. Man against nature. Nature against man. Nature against God. God against nature. Very funny religion!
D.T. Suzuki
I find myself thinking about my ongoing existence as a human being and the path that lies ahead of me. Though of course these thoughts lead to but one place - death.
Haruki Murakami
Time weighs down on you like an old, ambiguous dream. You keep on moving, trying to sleep through it. But even if you go to the ends of the earth, you won't be able to escape it. Still, you have to go there- to the edge of the world. There's something you can't do unless you get there.
Haruki Murakami
Resignation is what kills people. Once they've rejected resignation, humans gain the privilege of making humanity their footpath.
Kohta Hirano
What is a man?What is a woman?Why are men and women attracted to each other?Why do they desire each other?Love...what is it?
Yuu Watase
He is nothing more than one of my pawns. However, he is not a normal pawn. He is a pawn that can get across the whole board in one move.
Yana Toboso
In my heart, I am American, and I believe I have a free will and can take charge of my own destiny.
Ruth Ozeki
You’re afraid of imagination. And even more afraid of dreams. Afraid of the responsibility that begins in dreams. But you have to sleep, and dreams are a part of sleep. When you’re awake you can suppress imagination. But you can’t suppress dreams.
Haruki Murakami
Modern life seems to recede further and further away from nature, and closely connected with this fact we seem to be losing the feeling of reverence towards nature. It is probably inevitable when science and machinery, capitalism and materialism go hand in hand so far in a most remarkably successful manner. Mysticism, which is the life of religion in whatever sense we understand it, has come to be relegated altogether in the background. Without a certain amount of mysticism there is no appreciation for the feeling of reverence, and, along with it, for the spiritual significance of humility. Science and scientific technique have done a great deal for humanity; but as far as our spiritual welfare is concerned we have not made any advances over that attained by our forefathers. In fact we are suffering at present the worst kind of unrest all over the world.
D.T. Suzuki
…Her desire was close to that of the person who drowns himself; he does not necessarily covet death so much as what comes after the drowning—something different from what he had before, at least a different world.
Yukio Mishima
With jealousy, a parasite takes root in your heart. It becomes a cancer that eats away at your soul.
Haruki Murakami
Like it or not, it's the society we live in. Even the standard of right and wrong has been subdivided, made sophisticated. Within good, there's fashionable good and unfashionable good, and ditto for bad. Within fashionable good, there's formal and then there's casual; there's hip, there's cool, there's trendy, there's snobbish. Mix 'n' match.
Haruki Murakami
From New Year's Eve through the third of January, the streets of Tokyo grew quiet, as if all the people had disappeared.
Shogo Oketani
People have hope because they cannot see Death standing behind them.
Tite Kubo
After being hurt by the world so much, they began to see the demons within humans. So without hiding it through trickery, they worked to express it.
Osamu Dazai
That K was hesitant in love does not mean that his love was in any sense lukewarm. He was unable to move, despite the violence of his emotion. And since the impact of his new emotion was not so great as to allow him to forget himself, he was forced to look back and remind himself of what his past had meant. And in doing so he could not but continue along the path that he had so far followed.
Sōseki Natsume
In the city fields Contemplating cherry-trees...Strangers are like friends
Kobayashi Issa
To be a Russian writer at the end of the nineteenth century must have meant bearing an inescapably bitter fate. The more they tried to escape from Russia, the more deeply Russia swallowed them.
Haruki Murakami
I dream. Sometimes I think that's the only right thing to do.
Haruki Murakami
Every mystery novel I ever read, the great detective was such an arrogant fuck you could replace 70% of his dialogue with 'Are you stupid?' and the conversation would still make sense.
NisiOisiN
I cannot say this too strongly: Do not compare yourselves to others. Be true to who you are, and continue to learn with all your might.
Daisaku Ikeda
What is happiness? What is a good life? Is it a life without suffering? Something like that doesn't exist... Life is filled with suffering and sorrow. So it's no wonder that to those who fear suffering, the world seems like a living hell! And still...those who bravely keep going and try to push through this hell... They'll find that it's only a small stretch of the road to happiness. The truly great are those who never lose hope, even when thrown into hell... And as long as we have faith in ourselves, even hell itself can be a paradise!
Naoyuki Ochiai
When you lost sight of your path, listen for the destination in your heart (Allen Walker, D-gray Man)
Katsura Hoshino
As she stared at the restless pixels on the screen, her impatience grew. This agitation was familiar, a paradoxical feeling that built up inside her when she was spending too much time online, as though some force was at once goading her and holding her back. How to describe it? A temporal stuttering, an urgent lassitude, a feeling of simultaneous rushing and lagging behind. It was a horrible, stilted, panicky sensation, hard to put into words.
Ruth Ozeki
The best way to control people is to encourage them to be mischievous...To give your sheep or cow a large, spacious meadow is the way to control him. So it is with people: first let them do what they want, and watch them... To ignore them is not good; that is the worst policy. The second worst is trying to control them. The best one is to watch them, just to watch them, without trying to control them.
Shunryu Suzuki
I felt sure of this. However much I loved him, and as beautiful as the world was, none of it was powerful enough to take the weight off his heart, that heaviness that dragged him down, into the beyond, making him yearn to be at peace.
Banana Yoshimoto
In this sleepless night, as the darkness advances, look up at the sky and somehow remember that somewhere in this wide world, there are always people who love you, and people who need you. Because every person can't go on living alone.
Ai Yazawa
I never trust people with no appetite. It's like they're always holding something back on you.
Haruki Murakami
His mind floated in the amniotic fluid of memory, listening for echoes of the past. His father, meanwhile, had no idea that such a vivid scene was burned into Tengo's brain or that, like a cow in the meadow, Tengo was endlessly regurgitating fragments of the scene to chew on, a cud from which he obtained essential nutrients. Father and son: each was locked in a deep, dark embrace with his secrets.
Haruki Murakami
Great robber though he was, Kandata could only trash about like a dying frog as he choked on the blood of the pond.
Ryūnosuke Akutagawa