Quotes by Japanese Authors - Page 9

Certain kinds of information are like smoke: they work their way into people's eyes and minds whether sought out or not, and with no regard to personal preference.
Haruki Murakami
Fool! You may hate me...But I...I haven't stopped thinking of you for a single day.
Rumiko Takahashi
Throughout your life advance daily, becoming more skillful than yesterday, more skillful than today. This is never-ending.
Tsunetomo Yamamoto
Any man who criticizes my suicide and passes judgment on me with an expression of superiority, declaring (without offering the least help) that I should have gone on living my full complement of days, is assuredly a prodigy among men quite capable of tranquilly urging the Emperor to open a fruit shop.
Osamu Dazai
You're the insane one. You don't even love the world you created. So how can you expect us to love and respect you?An endless repetition of natural destruction and stupid, meaningless wars. Because we don't understand it, we have no way to stop it.We may be stupid and not know what to do... But we fight to move forward towards that which we think is right. Not just sticking to the arbitrary boundaries you created.We make lots of mistakes, and get hurt... But we keep believing in miracles. Looking for a truth we can't yet see.We do it our own way. Because we believe our lives mean something.
Kaori Yuki
Don't forget - you're the one who swam across the freezing sea at night.
Haruki Murakami
When he laughed in his throat, the butterfly laughed at me too. It's obscene fluttering corrupted me into darkness.
Kazuya Minekura
That’s how stories happen — with a turning point, an unexpected twist. There’s only one kind of happiness, but misfortune comes in all shapes and sizes. It’s like Tolstoy said. Happiness is an allegory, unhappiness a story.
Haruki Murakami
Your heart is like a great river after a long spell of rain, spilling over its banks. All signposts that once stood on the ground are gone, inundated and carried away by that rush of water. And still the rain beats down on the surface of the river. Every time you see a flood like that on the news you tell yourself: That’s it. That’s my heart.
Haruki Murakami
Just 'cuz a kid is crying doesn't mean it's a conversation worth crying over.
Tite Kubo
My peak? Would I even have one? I hardly had had anything you could call a life. A few ripples. some rises and falls. But that's it. Almost nothing. Nothing born of nothing. I'd loved and been loved, but I had nothing to show. It was a singularly plain, featureless landscape. I felt like I was in a video game. A surrogate Pacman, crunching blindly through a labyrinth of dotted lines. The only certainty was my death.
Haruki Murakami
Once upon a time, you dragged a part of me into the world of the dead, and now Naoko has dragged another pat of me into that world.
Haruki Murakami
Sucked in and turned around by the blades, the night at first flows smoothly, but then it starts to take on a denser consistency. Already the night was nearly halfway through its course, so a good portion of it had hardened. Because of this, as I walked through it, it gave me none of the easy, buoyant feeling you get in the early-evening hours. Something about it seemed creaky. But that was, in its own way, typical of the night too.
Hiromi Kawakami
Samsa certainly had no idea what lay ahead. He was in the dark about everything: the future, of course, but the present and the past as well . What was right, and what was wrong? Just learning how to dress was a riddle.
Haruki Murakami
Making up for lost time?""Yes," I say. "A lot of things were stolen from my childhood. Lots of important things. And now I have to get them back." "In order to keep on living."I
Haruki Murakami
The real world—where I probably could never be happy, and never get anywhere.
Haruki Murakami
But remember this, Japanese boy... airplanes are not tools for war. They are not for making money. Airplanes are beautiful dreams. Engineers turn dreams into reality.
Hayao Miyazaki
I don't think avoiding conflict is not caring.~Shin
Ai Yazawa
Together we'll make magic...Who had conjured whom?She seemed to remember Oliver suggesting this once before, but she hadn't really appreciated the importance of his question. Was she the dream? Was Nao the one writing her into being? Agency is a tricky business, Muriel had said. Ruth had always felt substantial enough, but maybe she wasn't. Maybe she was as absent as her name indicated, a homeless and ghostly composite of words that the girl had assembled. She'd never had any cause to doubt her senses. Her empirical experience of herself, seemed trustworthy enough, but now in the dark, at four in the morning, she wasn't so sure.
Ruth Ozeki
The laugh left a bitter taste in our mouths, but we laughed out all the same.
Haruki Murakami
Whats the difference between a king and his horse?I dont mean some kiddy shit like one has 4 legs and the other has 2, or ones a person and ones an animal. If their form, ability, and power is exactly the same, then why is it one becomes the king and controls the battle and the other one becomes the horse and carries the king? There's only one answer...INSTINCT!!!
Tite Kubo
At times everything grows misty and dark before my eyes, and I feel that the strength of my whole body is oozing away through my finger tips.
Osamu Dazai
a question is embarrassing for a moment, but not asking is embarrassing for a lifetime
Haruki Murakami
By just living one’s life, sadness accumulates here and there, be it in the sheets hung out in the sun to dry, the toothbrushes in the bathroom, and the history logs of the mobile phone…In the last several years, I have forged ahead without any regard, just to touch what I cannot reach. Without understanding the sources from which this menacing thought surged forth from, I continued working. When I at last noticed, my heart had already become hard from the gradual loss of its youthful vitality. And on certain morning, when I at last came to an earnest realization that I had lost everything that was beautiful, I knew I was at my limits and quit the company.
Makoto Shinkai
Listen up - there's no war that will end all wars.
Haruki Murakami
The two of them on top of the freezing slide, wordlessly holding hands. Once again they were a ten-year-old boy and girl. A lonely boy, and a lonely girl. A classroom, just after school let out, at the beginning of winter. They had neither the power nor the knowledge to know what they should offer to each other, what they should be seeking. They had never, ever, been truly loved, or truly loved someone else. They had never held anyone, never been held. They had not idea, either, where this action would take them. What they entered then was a doorless room. They couldn't get out, nor could anyone else come in. The two of them didn't know it at the time, but this was the only truly complete place in the entire world. Totally isolated, yet the one place not tainted with loneliness.
Haruki Murakami
There was no sudden twists or ups and downs, just stories of that person's everyday life. The theme was "growing old". There were no beautiful wo
Takashi Kajii
I thought about Kizuki. "So you finally made Naoko yours," I heard myself telling him. Oh, well, she was yours to begin with. Now maybe, she's where she belongs. But in this world, in this imperfect world of the living, I did the best I could for Naoko.
Haruki Murakami
What I always say is that Japanese are like willow. We can be bent easily, but once you try to break us, it would not be so easy.
Hiroko Sakai
As I mentioned briefly on the phone, the best thing about the Air Chrysalis is that it's not an imitation of anyone. It has absolutely none of the usual new writer's sense of 'I want to be another so-and-so'. the syle, for sure, is rough,and the writing is clumsy. She even gets the title wrong: she's confusing 'chrysalis' and 'cocoon'. You could pick it apart completely if you wanted to. But the story itself has real power: it draws you in. the overall plots is a fantasy, but the descriptive details is incredibly real.The balance between the two is excellent. I don't know if words like 'originality' or Inevitability' fit here, and I suppose I might agree if someone insisted it's not at that level, but finally, after you work your way through the thing, with all its faults, it leaves a real impression- it gets to you in some strange, inexplicable way that may be a little disturbing.
Haruki Murakami
Fashion sighs after trends. I want timeless elegance. Fashion has no time. I do. I say: Hello Lady, how can I help you? Fashion has no time to even ask such a question, because it is constantly concerned with finding out: What will come next? It is more about helping women to suffer less, to attain more freedom and independence.
Yohji Yamamoto
Memories, even your most precious ones, fade surprisingly quickly. But I don’t go along with that. The memories I value most, I don’t ever see them fading.
Kazuo Ishiguro
L shot Maki a disappointed look. But soon he forgot everything when Misa Amane appeared onstage. Enraptured he began to cheer with the girls in black lace and frilly skirts.
Tsugumi Ohba
I think of you as a friend. I used to think "friend" was just another word... Nothing more, nothing less. But when I met you, I realized what was important was the word's meaning.
Masashi Kishimoto
If something came out of the deal, it couldn’t make things any worse for us than they already were, I thought. But I couldn’t have been more wrong. Hell has no true bottom.
Haruki Murakami
The strength I'm looking for isn't the type where you win or lose. I'm not after a wall that'll repel power coming from outside. What I want us the kind of strength to be able to absorb that kind of power, to stand up to it. The strength to quietly endure things - unfairness, misfortunes, sadness, mistakes, misunderstandings.
Haruki Murakami
Dreaming is the day job of novelists, but sharing our dreams is a still more important task for us. We cannot be novelists without this sense of sharing something.
Haruki Murakami
I like your voice the most in this world.
Natsuki Kizu
If you think equality will stop the fighting, you're deluding yourself! If everyone receives the same compensation, they will stop working for it, which will lead to the weakening of our nation! The only result will be conflict born from poverty!
Adachitoka
This was a factory, a sorting house. We were no different from dogs and pigs and cows: all of us were allowed to play when we were small, but then, just before reaching maturity, we were sorted and classified. Being a high school student was the first step toward becoming a domestic animal.
Ryū Murakami
Because he had been- and in many ways still was- such a brilliant man, he no doubt understood the nature of his memory problem. It wasn't pride that prevented him from asking for help but a deep aversion to causing more trouble than necessary for those of us who lived in the normal world.
Yōko Ogawa
When I was a student, there wasn't a single thing we did that was unrelated to others. It was all for the Emperor, or parents, or the country, or society—everything was other-centered, which means that all educated men were hypocrites. When society changed, this hypocrisy ceased to work, and as a result, self-centeredness was gradually imported into thought and action, and egoism became enormously over-developed. Instead of the old hypocrites, now all we've got are out-and-out rogues. Do you see what I mean by that?
Sōseki Natsume
SISTER. I CAN'T TELL YOU TO "BE HAPPY". BEING UNHAPPY IS HONESTLY QUITE EASY. BEING HAPPY, ON THE OTHER HAND IS FAR MORE DIFFICULT. THAT'S WHY. "LIVE." "LIVE." THAT ONE WORD IS ALL I CAN SAY. EVEN IT FEELS LIKE PAIN TRIES TO REND YOUR HEART ASUNDER. EVEN IF SUFFERING THREATENS TO TWIST YOUR SMILE."LIVE." THAT IS MY PRAYER. MY WISH.HINAMI
Sui Ishida
The new day is almost here, but the old one is still dragging its heavy skirts. Just as ocean water and river water struggle against each other at a river mouth, the old time and the new time clash and blend.
Haruki Murakami
There was much about him that was fine and beautiful, but he could never find the confidence he needed.
Haruki Murakami
Your body is like a dew-drop on the morning grass, your life is as brief as a flash of lightning. Momentary and vain, it is lost in a moment. (From 'Fukan zazengi')
Dōgen
Leave it to the Americans to use love as a motivational tool while challenging insects to declare whether they are with you or against you.
Taiyo Fujii
Hey, you know that thing Dostoyevesky wrote on gambling? It's like that. When you're surrounded by endless possibilities, one of the hardest things you can do is pass them up.
Haruki Murakami
At the crossroad in my life, I didn't know which way to go. I just mindlessly choose a random direction... then, after regretting my decision I tried to retrace my steps. However, without even realizing it the sun had already set.
Nobuyuki Fukumoto
Even I recognize that I'm not being a proper role model right now. But I need you to understand. As your mother, it's my duty to protect you from the evil intentions of whoever did this...and I'll become a demon if I have to. That's all there is to it.
Ryukishi07
O.K., so I'm not so smart. I'm working class. But it's the working class that keeps the world running, and it's the working class that gets exploited. What the hell kind of revolution have you got just tossing out big words that working-class people can't understand? What the hell kind of social revolution is that? I mean, I'd like to make the world a better place, too. If somebody's really being exploited, we've got to put a stop to it. That's what I believe, and that's why I ask questions.
Haruki Murakami
I have a lot more patience for others than I have for myself, and I am much better at bringing out the best in others than in myself. That's just the kind of person I am. I'm the scratchy stuff on the side of the matchbox.
Haruki Murakami
Foe unvanquished, I will not perish in the field; I will be born again to take up the halberd seven more times.
Kuribayashi Tadamichi
I want to write stories that are different from the ones I've written so far, Junpei thought: I want to write about people who dream and wait for the night to end, who long for the light so they can hold the ones they love.
Haruki Murakami
it'll be this kind of deep blue”she said. “The kind of color that somehow sucks your eyes and your ears and all your words —the color of a completely closed-in night
Banana Yoshimoto
But facts, remembered or not, are all, alas, still facts
Sōseki Natsume
Something as superfluous as "play" is also an essential feature of our consciousness. If you ask children why they like to play, they will say, "Because it's fun." But that invites the next question: What is fun? Actually, when children play, they are often trying to reenact complex human interactions in simplified form. Human society is extremely sophisticated, much too involved for the developing brains of young children, so children run simplified simulations of adult society, playing games such as doctor, cops and robber, and school. Each game is a model that allows children to experiment with a small segment of adult behavior and then run simulations into the future. (Similarly, when adults engage in play, such as a game of poker, the brain constantly creates a model of what cards the various players possess, and then projects that model into the future, using previous data about people's personality, ability to bluff, etc. The key to games like chess, cards, and gambling is the ability to simulate the future. Animals, which live largely in the present, are not as good at games as humans are, especially if they involve planning. Infant mammals do engage in a form of play, but this is more for exercise, testing one another, practicing future battles, and establishing the coming social pecking order rather than simulating the future.)
Michio Kaku
Everything in the world is actually connected. That means, even if we get separated, we'll never be alone
Shinobu Ohtaka
People from different cultures have different definitions for beauty. Isn't that sad to judge others with our standards... rather than appreciate them?
Mizuki Nomura
I'll let you in on a secret ...How to avoid taking a wrong turn. I speak from experience. Don't blame the world around you. The world is very much larger ...than you realize. Large enough to embrace all of you.
Yellow Tanabe