Quotes by Japanese Authors - Page 3

We ran into lots of old friends. Friends from elementary school, junior high school, high school. Everyone had matured in their own way, and even as we stood face to face with them they seemed like people from dreams, sudden glimpses through the fences of our tangled memories. We smiled and waved, exchanged a few words, and then walked on in our separate directions.
Banana Yoshimoto
I don't have a method of stepping into the depths of your heart without getting it dirty." -Kuchiki Rukia
Tite Kubo
The whole terrible fight occured in the area of imagination. That is the precise location of our battlefield. It is there, that we experience our victories and defeats.
Haruki Murakami
No matter how pathetic or pitiful, every human is fated to have one moment in their lives in which they can change their own destiny.
Takayuki Yamaguchi
Above a certain size and level of prosperity, regional cities in Japan look alike. To discover what makes each one different, one has to sample the food and the sake, and stay long enough to see the patterns of life under the surface. Otherwise it can be hard to tell them apart. Wealth tends to smooth out the differences in the way people live. Life becomes standardized.Only in nature, in the mountains and valleys beyond the hand of man, are the real differences, the real uniqueness, preserved. There is something about the air in Hokkaido, a kind of richness that will never change. For better or worse, the only thing that really changes is people.
Miyuki Miyabe
In its broad sense, civilization means not only comfort in daily necessities but also the refining of knowledge and the cultivation of virtue so as to elevate human life to a higher plane.
Yukichi Fukuzawa
I can understand where he's coming from... I too was once secretly in love with you, and I could do nothing but watch from afar. Being close to you while pretending that we're nothing more than friends. The first time I touched you with sexual intention, it was like an electrical current flowing through my fingertips and it paralyzed me. I wanted to make your senses go numb with pleasure. Not only physical pleasure, but desire too, deep inside.
Yonezou Nekota
All right people, listen up! If you've got a family back home waiting for you or if you just want to save your own skin, turn around and walk away. Also, women! I have no intention of fighting any women!
Hiromu Arakawa
I wasn't in love with her. And she didn't love me. For me the question of love was irrelevant. What I sought was the sense of being tossed about by some raging, savage force, in the midst of which lay something absolutely crucial. I had no idea what that was. But I wanted to thrust my hand right inside her body and touch it, whatever it was.
Haruki Murakami
In the pre-war era when itinerant home-remedy salesmen still wandered the country, they had a traditional patter for selling a potion that was supposed to be particularly effective in treating burns and cuts. A toad with four legs in front and six behind would be placed in a box with mirrors lining the four walls. The toad, amazed at its own appearance from every angle, would break into an oily sweat. This sweat would be collected and simmered for 3,721 days while being stirred with a willow branch. The result was the marvelous potion.When writing about myself, I feel something like that toad in the box.
Akira Kurosawa
To escape from the world means that one's mind is not concerned with the opinions of the world.
Dōgen
I was born to end up alone.
Yana Toboso
I wished the dream were real, and this reality a dream. But that wasn't the case. And that was why, whenever I woke up, I'd be crying. It wasn't because I was sad. When you return from a happy dream to sad reality, there's a chasm you have to step across, and you can't cross it without shedding tears. It doesn't matter how many times you do it.
Kyōichi Katayama
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
The true purpose [of Zen] is to see things as they are, to observe things as they are, and to let everything go as it goes... Zen practice is to open up our small mind.
Shunryu Suzuki
You were scared they were going to laugh at you, right? So let them! People who discourage others will never find their own happiness!
Inio Asano
One reason current discussions of justice are so impoverished is that our heterogeneous society does not have many shared texts. Shakespeare's plays are among the few secular texts that remain common enough and complex enough to sustain these conversation. His answers to our dilemmas may not "bear on all points." Yet they teach us not to underestimate the action of the flower.
Kenji Yoshino
Being alive, if you had to define it, meant emitting a variety of smells
Haruki Murakami
Every once in a while she'll get worked up and cry like that. But that's ok. She's letting her feelings out. The scary thing is not being able to do that. Then your feelings build up and harden and die inside. That's when you're in big trouble.
Haruki Murakami
He could only consider me as the living corpse of a would-be suicide, a person dead to shame, an idiot ghost.
Osamu Dazai
Listen to this, Nimit. Follow Coleman Hawkins' improvised lines very carefully. He is using them to tell us something. Pay very close attention. He is telling us the story of the free spirit that is doing everything it can to escape from within him. That same kind of spirit is inside me, inside you. There--you can hear it, I'm sure: the hot breath, the shivering heart. (Thailand)
Haruki Murakami
There are some among the so-called elite who are overbearing and arrogant. I want to foster leaders, not elitists.
Daisaku Ikeda
I felt so stupid and young, and at the same time something was cracking open inside me, or maybe it was the world was cracking open to show me something really important underneath. I knew I was only seeing a tiny bit of it, but it was bigger than anything I'd ever seen or felt before.
Ruth Ozeki
No matter how much you feel it in your heart, if you don't tell the person then it's meaningless.
Shungiku Nakamura
To be an artist means never to avert one's eyes.
Akira Kurosawa
I suddenly thought about my old girlfriend, the one I had first slept with in my third year of high school. Chills ran through me as I realized how badly I had treated her. I had hardly ever thought about her thoughts or feelings or the pain I had caused her. She was such a sweet and gentle thing, but at the time I had taken her sweetness for granted and later hardly gave her a second thought. What was she doing now? I wondered. And had she forgiven me?
Haruki Murakami
My design is no design.
Issey Miyake
That's the kind of death that frightens me. The shadow of death slowly, slowly eats away at the region of life, and before you know it everything's dark and you can't see, and the people around you think of you as more dead than alive.
Haruki Murakami
Kyubey: ...Oh, geez. I never would have thought you capable of throwing your friend off a bridge. That wasn't a sane act, Madoka!
Magica Quartet
Your daughter's coming of age, you ought to let her see the world a little.
Susumu Katsumata
The only time they ever throw anything away is when it's really and truly broken, and then they make a big deal about it. They save up all their bent pins and broken sewing needles and once a year they do a whole memorial service for them, chanting and then sticking them into a block of tofu so they will have a nice soft place to rest. Jiko says that everything has a spirit, even if it is old and useless, and we must console and honor the things that have served us well.
Ruth Ozeki
I'm going to be a person who writes stories.I never told mom and dad how much I loved them.I wanna be someone who can tell a lot of people how much I love them.
Kimama Aoboshi
When I need some striking inspiration about deep depression for my new painting, I just need to go to check my bank account...
Hiroko Sakai
You throw a stone into a deep pond. Splash. The sound is big, and it reverberates throughout the surrounding area. What comes out of the pond after that? All we can do is stare at the pond, holding our breath.
Haruki Murakami
There were times he thought it would have been far better to never have known. Yet he continued to return to his core principle: that, in every situation, knowledge was better than ignorance. However agonizing, it was necessary to confront the facts. Only through knowing could a person become strong.
Haruki Murakami
I felt guilty that I hadn't thought of Kizuki right away, as if I had somehow abandoned him. Back in my room, though, I came to think of it this way: two and a half years have gone by since it happened, and Kizuki is still seventeen years old. Not that this means my memory of him has faded. The things that his death gave rise to are still there, bright and clear, inside me, some of them even clearer than when they were new. What I want to say is this: I'm going to turn twenty soon. Part of what Kizuki and I shared when we were sixteen and seventeen has already vanished, and no amount of crying is going to bring that back. I can't explain it any better than this, but I think that you can probably understand what I felt and what I am trying to say.
Haruki Murakami
Fun things are fun.
Yui Hirasawa
I realize now, I was learning how to walk as well. I haven’t mastered the steps, I fall too. But im on my path, my path... and one day that path... will take me to her.
Makoto Shinkai
I mean, all I do here is do the work that my bosses tell me to do the way they tell me to do it. I don't have to think at all. It's like I just put my brain in a locker before I start work and pick it up on the way home. I spend seven hours a day at a workbench, planting hairs into wig bases, then I eat dinner in the cafeteria, take a bath, and of course I have to sleep, like everybody else, so out of a twenty-four-hour day, the amount of free time I have is like nothing. And because I'm so tired from work, the 'free time' I have I mostly spend lying around in a fog. I don't have any time to sit and think about anything. Of course, I don't have to work on the weekends, but then I have to do the laundry and cleaning I've let go, and sometimes I go into town, and before I know it the weekend is over. I once made up my mind to keep a diary, but I had nothing to write, so I quit after a week. I mean, I just do the same thing over and over again, day in, day out.
Haruki Murakami
In my heart, I am American, and I believe I have a free will and can take charge of my own destiny.
Ruth Ozeki
Marathon tidying produces a heap of garbage. At this stage, the one disaster that can wreak more havoc than an earthquake is the entrance of that recycling expert who goes by the alias of "mother.
Marie Kondō
To him, they looked like shadows that his wife had left behind. Size 7 shadows of his wife hung there in long rows, layer upon layer, as if someone had gathered and hung up samples of the infinite possibilities (or at least the theoretically infinite possibilities) implied in the existence of a human being.
Haruki Murakami
What each of us believes in is up to us, but life is impossible without believing in something.
Kentetsu Takamori
A natural person can achieve right diet because his instinct is in proper working order. He is satisfied with simple food; it is nutritious, tastes good, and is useful daily medicine. Food and the human spirit are united.
Fukuoka
Oshima's silent for a time as he gazes at the forest, eyes narrowed. Birds are flitting from one branch to the next. His hands are clasped behind his head. "I know how you feel," he finally says. "But this is something you have to work out on your own. Nobody can help you. That's what love's all about, Kafka. You're the one having those wonderful feelings, but you have to go it alone as you wander through the dark. Your mind and body have to bear it all. All by yourself.
Haruki Murakami
Let your body work until it is spent, but keep your mind to yourself.
Haruki Murakami
Many are the women who can take their clothes off seductively, but women who can charm as they dress?
Haruki Murakami
Believe in yourself and the world will follow suit.
Tadahiko Nagao
People cannot win against their loneliness because loneliness is this world’s worst kind of pain.
Masashi Kishimoto
I remembered seeing a media channel where they showed picture after picture of food items I had never seen before in my life. When I asked my father what it was, he said they called it the “Two Minutes’ Hate.
Project Itoh
In this world, whenever there is light, there are also shadows. As long as the concept of winners exist, there must also be losers. The selfish desire of wanting to maintain peace causes wars and hatred is born to protect love.
Masashi Kishimoto
The art of life lies in a constant readjustment to our surroundings.
Kakuzō Okakura
I didn't realize it until now, but I don't really know anything about them, or what kind of people they are, really. You can't see inside a person's heart.
Koushun Takami
I felt as though I owned the whole world. And little wonder, because at no time are we ever in such complete possession of a journey, down to its last nook and cranny , as when we are busy with preparations for it. After that, there remains only the journey itself, which is nothing but the process through which we lose our ownership of it. This is what makes travel so utterly fruitless.
Yukio Mishima
A giant octopus living way down deep at the bottom of the ocean. It has this tremendously powerful life force, a bunch of long, undulating legs, and it's heading somewhere, moving through the darkness of the ocean… It takes on all kinds of different shapes—sometimes it's 'the nation,' and sometimes it's 'the law,' and sometimes it takes on shapes that are more difficult and dangerous than that. You can try cutting off its legs, but they just keep growing back. Nobody can kill it. It's too strong, and it lives too far down in the ocean. Nobody knows where its heart is. What I felt then was a deep terror. And a kind of hopelessness, a feeling that I could never run away from this thing, no matter how far I went. And this creature, this thing doesn't give a damn that I'm me or you're you. In its presence, all human beings lose their names and their faces. We all turn into signs, into numbers.
Haruki Murakami
Writing a novel is like having a dream.
Haruki Murakami
Fool! Nothing but black ink runs through my veins!
Hiromu Arakawa
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
Poor creatures. What did we do to you? With all our schemes and plans?
Kazuo Ishiguro
Does the hatred you feel ever disappear? Or is it something that never goes away... No matter how many times you try to erase it? What I have always feared the most... Is myself. Because I, too, have hatred inside me.
Naoki Urasawa