Quotes by Japanese Authors - Page 14

The role of a story was, in the broadest terms, to transpose a single problem into another form. ... It was like a piece of paper bearing the indecipherable text of a magic spell.
Haruki Murakami
Gay men! And it's incest! With the same face!
Bisco Hatori
Darkness... When everything that you know and love... is taken from you so harshly... all you can think about is anger, hatred, and even revenge... and no one can save you.
Masashi Kishimoto
…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
I believe that I have not been fair to you and that, as a result, I must have led you around in circles and hurt you deeply. In doing so, however, I have led myself around in circles and hurt myself just as deeply. I say this not as an excuse or a means of self-justification but because it is true. If I have left a wound inside you, it is not just your wound but mine as well. So please try not to hate me. I am a flawed human being - a far more flawed being than you realize. Which is precisely why I do not want you to hate me. Because if you were to do that, I would really go to pieces. I can't do what you can do: I can't slip inside my shell and wait for things to pass. I don't know for a fact that you are really like that, but sometimes you give me that impression. I often envy that in you, which may be why I led you around in circles so much. This may be an over-analytical way of looking at things. Don't you agree? The therapy they perform here is certainly not over-analytical, but when you are under treatment for several months the way I am here, like it or not, you become more or less analytical. "This was caused by that, and that means this, because of which such-and-such."Like that. I can't tell whether this kind of analysis is trying to simplify the world or complicate it.In any case, I myself feel that I am far closer to recovery than I once was, and people here tell me this is true. This is the first time in a long while I have been able to sit down and calmly write a letter. The one I wrote you in July was something I had to squeeze out of me (though, to tell the truth, I don't remember what I wrote - was it terrible?), but this time I am very calm. How wonderful it is to be able to write someone a letter! To feel like conveying your thoughts to a person, to sit at your desk and pick up a pen, to put your thoughts into words like this is truly marvellous. Of course, once I do put them to words, I find I can only express a fraction of what I want to say, but that's all right. I'm happy just to be able to feel I want to write to someone. And so I am writing to you.
Haruki Murakami
Every human personality is the product of an innate drive to create something unique from one’s raw individual experience.
Tadahiko Nagao
To wit, existence is communication and communication is existence.
Haruki Murakami
Ruri: Is it possible that Shuichiro gets more cuddly every day?Hari: Indubitably...
CLAMP
I guess I've been waiting so long I'm looking for perfection. That makes it tough.
Haruki Murakami
A cell is just a room if you don't lock the door.
Haruki Murakami
[I]t's not enough to be right. I think you have to be generous. It's not enough to be logical. You have to be virtuous...[Y]our demeanor will carry your message, perhaps, even further than your words will...[P]eople don't just disagree with us. Many of them genuinely think that we are evil, and when people think you're evil, I don't think they listen very carefully to your words. They search your manner. They look for the slightest excuse to ignore all your impregnable arguments, all of your carefully-marshaled facts, and that's why we must never be mean-spirited or angry or petulant, or dismissive of the interest of others. I believe rudeness and arrogance, they would drive people away, that would only confirm their own prejudices. It's the excuse they're desperate for to walk away smug and happy and say 'these people are just small-minded angry bigots.' Our opponents don't recognize our good faith, but -and this is a hard thing- I think we must try our best to recognize their good faith...You can't expect them to recognize our good intentions unless we are willing to recognize theirs.
Jared Taylor
Unless you find the fundamental cause and treat that, the same problem will surface later on in a different form.
Haruki Murakami
Beyond the edge of the world there’s a space where emptiness and substance neatly overlap, where past and future form a continuous, endless loop. And, hovering about, there are signs no one has ever read, chords no one has ever heard.
Haruki Murakami
[Tea-masters] have given emphasis to our natural love of simplicity, and shown us the beauty of humility. In fact, through their teachings tea has entered the life of the people.
Kakuzō Okakura
Living like an empty shell is not really living, no matter how many years it may go on. The heart and flesh of an empty shell give birth to nothing more than the life of an empty shell.
Haruki Murakami
In a totally dysfunctional society, the profession of a writer would not exist.
Minae Mizumura
When I lived on the Bluff in Yokohama I spend a good deal of my leisure in the company of foreign residents, at their banquets and balls. At close range I was not particularly struck by their whiteness, but from a distance I could distinguish them quite clearly from the Japanese. Among the Japanese were ladies who were dressed in gowns no less splendid than the foreigners’, and whose skin was whiter than theirs. Yet from across the room these ladies, even one alone, would stand out unmistakably from amongst a group of foreigners. For the Japanese complexion, no matter how white, is tinged by a slight cloudiness. These women were in no way reticent about powdering themselves. Every bit of exposed flesh—even their backs and arms—they covered with a thick coat of white. Still they could not efface the darkness that lay below their skin. It was as plainly visible as dirt at the bottom of a pool of pure water. Between the fingers, around the nostrils, on the nape of the neck, along the spine—about these places especially, dark, almost dirty, shadows gathered. But the skin of the Westerners, even those of a darker complexion, had a limpid glow. Nowhere were they tainted by this gray shadow. From the tops of their heads to the tips of their fingers the whiteness was pure and unadulterated. Thus it is that when one of us goes among a group of Westerners it is like a grimy stain on a sheet of white paper. The sight offends even our own eyes and leaves none too pleasant a feeling.
Jun'ichirō Tanizaki
The love of nature is religion, and that religion is poetry; these three things are one thing. This is the unspoken creed of haiku poets.
R.H. Blyth
It's hard not being able to see you, but my life in Tokyo would be a lot worse if it weren't for you.
Haruki Murakami
Oh this? It's a 'bookworm.'They live in books, and they love to eat important or valuable words.
CLAMP
It was a different sense of isolation from what he normally felt in Japan. And not such a bad feeling, he decided. Being alone in two senses of the word was maybe like a double negation of isolation. In other words, it made perfect sense for him, a foreigner, to feel isolated here. The thought calmed him. He was in exactly the right place.
Haruki Murakami
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
To be able to see into a friends' dream is a dream in itself.-Doctor Kōsaku Tokita (Paprika)
Yasutaka Tsutsui
If only I could fallsound asleep and wake up in my old reality!
Haruki Murakami
And it came to me then. That we were wonderful traveling companions but in the end no more than lonely lumps of metal in their own separate orbits. From far off they look like beautiful shooting stars, but in reality they're nothing more than prisons, where each of us is locked up alone, going nowhere. When the orbits of these two satellites of ours happened to cross paths, we could be together. Maybe even open our hearts to each other. But that was only for the briefest moment. In the next instant we'd be in absolute solitude. Until we burned up and became nothing.
Haruki Murakami
Anyway, I forgot all about him once I graduated. So quickly and easily, it was weird. What was it about him that had made the seventeen-year-old me fall so hard? Try as I might, I couldn’t remember. Life is strange, isn’t it? You can be totally entranced by something one minute, be willing to sacrifice everything to make it yours, but then a little time passes, or your perspective changes a bit, and all of a sudden you’re shocked at how its glow has faded. What was I looking at? you wonder. So that’s the story of my ‘breaking-and-entering’ period.
Haruki Murakami
We who are born into this age of freedom and independence and the self must undergo this loneliness. It is the price we pay for these times of ours.
Sōseki Natsume
A mind full of preconceived ideas, subjective intentions, or habits it not open to things as they are.
Shunryu Suzuki
Iedolas : A curious old law I still permit in the outlands. A thief who escapes his captor can no longer be held to account for his crime.Regis : A warning to the victim? Never show weakness, lest you forgo the hand of justice.Iedolas : Oh no, good king. Far from it. It is a warning to the hand of justice itself: Never to loose its grip.
Takeshi Nozue
No matter how fierce was the passion that gripped him, the fact is he was paralyzed, transfixed by the contemplation of his own past. Only something so momentous as to drive from his consciousness all thoughts of before and after could have propelled him forward. And with his eyes fixed on the past, he had no choice but to continue along its trajectory.
Sōseki Natsume
Once you’re lost, you panic. You’re in total despair, not knowing what to do. I hate it when that happens. Sex can be a real pain that way, ‘cause when you get in the mood all you can think about is what’s right under your nose - that’s sex, all right.
Haruki Murakami
If god is dead, who's going to fix this mess?
Satoshi Kon
don't wait for the man standing in the snowto cut off his arm help him now
Ikkyu
Maybe Trünicht was to society what a cancer cell could be to the body—consuming the healthy cells’ nutrition so that it alone would multiply, grow stronger and bigger, and at last kill its host. Trünicht would agitate for war one day, insist on democracy the next, and steadily increase his power and influence while never taking responsibility for anything he said. Therefore, the stronger he got, the weaker society would become, until he would finally consume it.
Yoshiki Tanaka
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
Well, you're right. I'm a Freak.""Huh?""I love being bullied. Being hit and kicked by others gets me totally excited. That's what kind of freak I am.Sorry if that bothers you.
Yuna Kagesaki
Loving another person is a wonderful thing, and if that love is sincere, no one ends up tossed into a labyrinth. You have to have more faith in yourself.
Haruki Murakami
We have learnt a lesson: words written in books, all of them, are lies. There are no exceptions. Words written on papers are all deceitful.If we put it in a more proper manner, counting non-fiction works, then things like documents, reports, and reviews that are recorded are also deceitful.There’s nothing but deceit.Don’t believe in the for-sale literature.
NisiOisiN
Nana...how come being happy and making your dreams come true are two different things? Even now, I still don't know why...
Ai Yazawa
yes, i have dated Salvador Dali guy when i was a high school girl. he was a great lover. but i had to dump him because he stole my inspiration of bent clock*~* .... who cares...
Hiroko Sakai
Granting that there is some truth to the theory that defects in society give rise to the emergence of criminals, I still maintain that those who use this theory as a defense of criminality are overlooking the fact that there are many people in this defective society who survive without resorting to crime. The argument to the contrary is pure sophistry.
Akira Kurosawa
But you knoe, she's right. Every single day, each time I see her face, see her, it's utterly precious.
Haruki Murakami
Great men are allowed to spill the blood of others.
Naoyuki Ochiai
A strange, terrific force unlike anything I've ever experienced is sprouting in my heart, taking root there, growing. Shut up behind my rib cage, my warm heart expands and contracts independent of my will--over and over.
Haruki Murakami
I have relinquished all that ties me to the world, but the one thing that still haunts me is the beauty of the sky
Yoshida Kenkō
Reflection may be essential to a scholar, but it’s taboo in social intercourse.
Sōseki Natsume
What a disgrace! They were afraid...ashamed...they chose to conceal it...they buried the roots of a Great Civilization...they lacked the courage to go further...and turned their backs on what science had to offer them...and tried to seal away forever the hole they had torn open with their own hands.
Katsuhiro Otomo
I like black for clothes, small items, and jewelry. It's a color that can't be violated by any other colors. A color that simply keeps being itself. A color that sinks more somberly than any other color, yet asserts itself more than all other colors. It's a passionate gallant color. Anything is wonderful if it transcends things rather than being halfway...
Yana Toboso
According to his thinking, man was not born for a particular purpose. Quite the opposite: a purpose developed only with the birth of an individual. To objectively fabricate a purpose at the outset and to apply it to a human being was to rob him at birth of freedom of action. Hence, purpose was something that the individual had to make for himself. But no one, no matter who, could freely create a purpose. This was because the purpose of one's existence was as good as announced to the universe by the course of that existence itself.Starting from this premise, Daisuke held that one's natural activities constituted one's natural purposes. A man walked because he wanted to. Then walking became his purpose. He thought because he wanted to. Then, thinking became his purpose. Just as to walk or to think for a particular purpose meant the degradation of walking and thinking, so to establish an external purpose and to act to fulfill it meant the degradation of action. Accordingly, those who used the sum of their actions as a means to an end were in effect destroying the purpose of their own existence.
Sōseki Natsume
In your big mind, everything has the same value...In your practice you should accept everything as it is, giving to each thing the same respect given to a Buddha. Here there is Buddhahood
Shunryu Suzuki
To know aberrations is to become involved with them.
NisiOisiN
Lost opportunities, lost possibilities, feelings we can never get back. That's part of what it means to be alive. But inside our heads - at least that's where I imagine it - there's a little room where we store those memories. A room like the stacks in this library. And to understand the workings of our own heart we have to keep on making new reference cards. We have to dust things off every once in awhile, let in fresh air, change the water in the flower vases. In other words, you'll live forever in your own private library.
Haruki Murakami
Aren't you afraid of dying?Not really. I've watched lots of good-for-nothing, worthless people die, and if people like that can do it, then I should be able to handle it.
Haruki Murakami
You need to remember that. If you’re to have decent lives, you have to know who you are and what lies ahead of you, every one of you.
Kazuo Ishiguro
Writing things was important, wasn't it? Nakata asked.'Yes, it was. The process of writing was important. Even though the finished product is completely meaningless.
Haruki Murakami
I think of you now mare than ever. It's raining today.
Haruki Murakami
When you are used to the kind of life -of never getting anything you want- you stop knowing what it is you want.
Haruki Murakami
once your get your hopes up, your mind starts acting on its own. And when your hopes are dashed you get dissapointed, and dissapointment leads to a feeling of helplessness. You get careless and let your guard down. And right now, she though, that si the last thing I can afford.
Haruki Murakami
True kindness isn't something we're born with. It's something we have to work at. Not everyone has it. But I think everyone has the potential. Sometimes you just have to look really close before you can tell it's there."-Kyoko
Natsuki Takaya
The memories of sensei I carry with me are more cruel than sensei himself.
Mika Yamamori