Quotes by Japanese Authors - Page 34

I go out on the porch and gaze up at the stars twinkling above, the random scattering of millions of stars. Even in a planetarium you wouldn't find as many. Some of them really look big and distinct, like if you reached your hand out intently you could touch them. The whole thing is breathtaking. Not just beautiful though--the stars like the trees in the forest, alive and breathing. And they're watching me. What I've done up till now, what I'm going to do--they know it all. Nothing gets past their watchful eyes. As I sit there under the shining night sky, again a violent fear takes hold of me. My heart's pounding a mile a minute, and I can barely breathe. All these millions of stars looking down on me, and I've never given them more than a passing thought before. Bot just stars--how many other things haven't I noticed in the world, things I know nothing about? I suddenly feel helpless, completely powerless. And I know I'll never outrun that awful feeling. (135)
Haruki Murakami
There's nothing happy about love at all!! I would rather have not known real love... if it hurts this much.
Chitose Yagami
Waiting for your answer is one of the most painful things I have ever been through. At least let me know whether or not I hurt you
Haruki Murakami
When things get really bad, you take comfort in the placeness of a place.
Banana Yoshimoto
So... Stop shaking my heart like this.
Yamane Ayano
Jimmy: When you die, I dieSora: Wow, that's some serious relationship!
Shiro Amano
When a country is defeated, there remain only mountains and rivers, and on a ruined castle in spring only grasses thrive. I sat down on my hat and wept bitterly till I almost forgot time.A thicket of summer grassIs all that remainsOf the dreams and ambitionsOf ancient warriors.
Bashō Matsuo
A little light in the dark night A faint voice is calling you This way! This way! This flickering, wavering little voiceLike dew, like a bonfireThe voice of insectsthe sound of the water You can never lose themonce you've heard them...
Natsumi Mukai
By then she was dead. In fact, she may have been dead a while ago. Physically, several seconds ago, mentally, ages ago.
Koushun Takami
What do you think dignity's all about?'The directness of the inquiry did, I admit, take me rather by surprise. 'It's rather a hard thing to explain in a few words, sir,' I said. 'But I suspect it comes down to not removing one's clothing in public.
Kazuo Ishiguro
Time could heal, but it wouldn't make wrongs go away. Time came back like a reminder. Time folded with memory. In a moment, everything could fold itself up, and time stand still.
Karen Tei Yamashita
Thinking of you, wherever you areWe pray for our sorrows to end,and hope that our hearts will blend.Now I will step forward to realize this wish.And who knows,starting a new journey may not be so hardOr maybe it has already begun.There are many worlds.but they share the same skyone sky, one destiny. Kairi
Square Enix
The Earth, time, concepts, love, life, faith justice, evil - they're all fluid and in transition. They don't stay in one form or in one place forever. The whole universe is like some big FedEx box.
Haruki Murakami
Even though you read much Zen literature, you must read each sentence with a fresh mind. You should not say, “I know what Zen is,” or “I have attained enlightenment.” This is also the real secret of the arts: always be a beginner.”-“When you are sitting in the middle of your own problem, which is more real to you: your problem or you yourself? The awareness that you are here, right now, is the ultimate fact. ”-“Knowing that your life is short, to enjoy it day after day, moment after moment, is the life of “form is form and emptiness is emptiness.”-“You may feel as if you are doing something special, but actually it is only the expression of your true nature; it is the activity which appeases your inmost desire. But as long as you think you are practicing zazen for the sake of something, that is not true practice.”-“The most important thing is to forget all gaining ideas, all dualistic ideas. In other words, just practice zazen in a certain posture.
Shunryu Suzuki
Perhaps there are those who are able to go about their lives unfettered by such concerns. But for those like us, our fate is to face the world as orphans, chasing through long years the shadows of vanished parents. There is nothing for it but to try and see through our missions to the end, as best we can, for until we do so, we will be permitted no calm.
Kazuo Ishiguro
That's evolution. Evolution's always hard. Hard and bleak. No such thing as happy evolution
Haruki Murakami
In this world, there is no absolute good, no absolute evil," the man said. "Good and evil are not fixed, stable entities but are continually trading places. A good may be transformed into an evil in the next second. And vice versa. Such was teh way of the world that Dostoevksy depicted in The Brothers Karamazov. The most important thing is to maintain the balance between the constantly moving good and evil. If you lean too much in either direction, it becomes difficult to maintain actual morals. Indeed, balance itself is the good.
Haruki Murakami
What happiness to sit in intimate conversation with someone of like mind, warmed by candid discussion of the amusing and fleeting ways of this world ... but such a friend is hard to find, and instead you sit there doing your best to fit in with whatever the other is saying, feeling deeply alone.
Kenkō Hōshi (Yoshida Kenkō)
Writers are writing in every corner of the globe.Writers are writing, moreover, in rich countries and poor countries alike.
Minae Mizumura
We're all born with selfish desires, so we can all relate to those feelings in others. But kindness is something made individually by each person...so it's easy to misunderstand when others are trying to be kind to you.
Natsuki Takaya
Even if things were the same, people's perception of them might have been very different back then. The darkness of night was probably deeper then, so the moon must have been that much bigger and brighter.
Haruki Murakami
It made me sad when I caught myself pretending that everybody out there in cyberspace cared about what I thought, when really nobody gives a shit. And when I multiplied that sad feeling by all the millions of people in their lonely little rooms, furiously writing and posting to their lonely little pages that nobody has time to read because they’re all so busy writing and posting, it kind of broke my heart.
Ruth Ozeki
Like vanishing dew,a passing apparitionor the sudden flashof lightning -- already gone --thus should one regard one's self.
Ikkyu
Shizuo Heiwajima, the strongest man in Ikebukuro: "I just want the ability to control myself. That's the kind of strength I want.
Ryohgo Narita
No one can escape their past. The sins we've committed... and the sadness we've caused... No matter how far we run, our past remains, as ever-present as the moon in the sky. It looms in wait... for the day when we are forced to face it. But only in doing so can we truly make peace and move on in hope towards tomorrow.
Phoenix Wright
We get swallowed up by the illusion that unless we can find a place to belong, we are going to be all alone in the world.
Naoki Higashida
So that's how we live our lives. No matter how deep and fatal the loss, no matter how important the thing that's stolen from us--that's snatched right out of our hands--even if we are left completely changed, with only the outer layer of skin from before, we continue to play out our lives this way, in silence. We draw ever nearer to the end of our allotted span of time, bidding it farewell as it trails off behind. Repeating, often adroitly, the endless deeds of the everyday. Leaving behind a feeling of immeasurable emptiness.
Haruki Murakami
Tengo had a gift for such work. He was a born technician, possessing both the intense concentration of a bird sailing through the air in search of prey and the patience of a donkey hauling water, playing always by the rules of the game.
Haruki Murakami
From dawn to dusk I spent my time in the real world. Only in my dreams at night could I indulge my fantasies.
Rampo Edogawa
The wounds from that time have already become scabs.
Mika Yamamori
A person's last moments are an important thing. You can't choose how you're born but you can choose how you die.
Haruki Murakami
Are you asking because you really want an answer?
Haruki Murakami
Everybody gets hurt. Sometimes a big hurt, sometimes a little hurt. But the person who's suffered a lot isn't especially strong. And the person who's been hurt a little isn't especially weak. What's important is being able to get over it.
Sakura Tsukuba
A truly brave man is ever serene; he is never taken by surprise; nothing ruffles the equanimity of his spirit. In the heat of battle he remains cool; in the midst of catastrophes he keeps level his mind. Earthquakes do not shake him, he laughs at storms. We admire him as truly great, who, in the menacing presence of danger or death, retains his self-possession; who, for instance, can compose a poem under impending peril or hum a strain in the face of death. Such indulgence betraying no tremor in the writing or in the voice, is taken as an infallible index of a large nature—of what we call a capacious mind (Yoyū), which, far from being pressed or crowded, has always room for something more.
Inazo Nitobe
You don’t know what it means to be betrayed! Should I explain it to you? It means to be treated like trash and your feelings get stepped on…you get hurt over and over again and in the end you are left alone!Can’t you see how much I care for you? How hard I’m trying to connect with you?When did I ever betray you? When did I ever leave you alone?
Yuuki Obata
I make it a point not to talk about the past. But you're special.
Yuhta Nishio
My love for her was close to piety. You may think it strange that I should use this word, with its religious connotation, to describe my feeling towards a woman. But even now I believe—and I believe it very strongly—that true love is not so far removed from religious faith.
Sōseki Natsume
Don't kill!...The fly is asking youTo save his lifeBy rubbing his hands together
Kobayashi Issa
Like this cup, you are full of your own opinions and speculations. How can I show you wisdom unless you first empty your cup?
Nyogen Senzaki
Taoism as the "art of being in the world," for it deals with the present—ourselves. It is in us that God meets with Nature, and yesterday parts from to-morrow. The Present is the moving Infinity, the legitimate sphere of the Relative. Relativity seeks Adjustment; Adjustment is Art. The art of life lies in a constant readjustment to our surroundings.
Kakuzō Okakura
Being like a rock wall" is when a master of martial arts suddenly becomes like a rock wall, inaccessible to anything at all, immovable.
Miyamoto Musashi
Kyoya: Some say I only became more calculating but I don't care... because you lose out if you don't have fun, right?
Bisco Hatori
The conclusion of things is the good. The good is, in other words, the conclusion at which all things arrive. Let's leave doubt for tomorrow," Komatsu said. "That is the point.
Haruki Murakami
It isn't that I dislike artists, but I can't stand anyone who puts on those ponderous airs of a man of character.
Osamu Dazai
The instant that the blade tore open his flesh, the bright disk of the sun soared up and exploded behind his eyelids.
Yukio Mishima
I felt as though the vessel if my suffering had become empty, as if nothing could interest me now. I had lost even the ability to suffer.
Osamu Dazai
A great human revolution in just a single individual will help achieve a change in the destiny of a nation, and further, can even enable a change in the destiny of all humankind.
Daisaku Ikeda
I'm not gonna die alone, no way! He will never allow it!
Otsuichi
There will always be a door to the light.
Shiro Amano
People leave strange little memories of themselves behind when they die.
Haruki Murakami
My face, body, lifestyle, I chose every aspect of myself with my own will. I don´t want to be ordered around by anyone anymore, and I have no need for a past. I´ve got dreams to fulfill, money to earn, love to find and success do achieve. They may be foolishly simplistic desire for some, but to me, working towards them bit by bit is how I build my confidence.
Inio Asano
Remember how to breathe, how to live...please!!
Fuyumi Soryo
Precipitate as weather, she appeared from somewhere, then evaporated, leaving only memory.
Haruki Murakami
The dead don't desire revenge, but the happiness of the livng. To dirty your small hands would bring joy to no one.-Kenshin to Eiji
Nobuhiro Watsuki
Tears are handy for washing away troubling and sad feelings. But when you grow up, you'll learn that there are things so sad, they can never be washed away by tears. That there are painful memories that should never be washed away. So people who are truly strong laugh when they want to cry. They endure all of the pain and sorrow while laughing with everybody else.
Hideaki Sorachi
The universe is a symphony of strings. And the "Mind of God," which Einstein wrote eloquently about, is cosmic music resonating throughout hyperspace.
Michio Kaku
Writing from memory like this, I often feel a pang of dread. What if I've forgotten the most important thing? What if somewhere inside me there is a dark limbo where all the the truly important memories are heaped and slowly turning into mud?
Haruki Murakami
One measure of a civilization, in fact, is the percentage of misfits in its society.
Kōbō Abe
I often laughed, and you often gave me a dissatisfied look, till you pressed me to unfold my past before you as if it were a roll of pictures. It was then I felt respect for you. Because you unreservedly showed me your resolution to catch something alive in my being, and to sip the warm blood running in my body, by cutting my heart. At that time, I was still living, and did not want to die. So I rejected your request, promising to satisfy you some day. Now I am going to destroy my heart myself, and pour my blood into your veins. I shall be happy if a new life can enter into your bosom, when my heart has stopped beating.
Sōseki Natsume
Beauty is something that burns the hand when you touch it.
Yukio Mishima