I am an inconsistent creature. Perhaps it is the pressure of my past, and not my own perverse mind, that has made me into this contradictory being. I am all too well aware of this fault in myself. You must forgive me.
Watch birth and death:The lotus has alreadyOpened its flower.
But facts, remembered or not, are all, alas, still facts
The average novel invariably reads like a detective’s report. It is drab and tedious because it is never objective.
It is painfully easy to define human beings. They are beings who, for no good reason at all, create their own unnecessary suffering.
Hirota feels strongly drawn toward nature and the natural, is hyper-sensitive to the artificial—particularly that most cramped and constraining man-made creation, society—and does his best to avoid it.
I may be someone who was always destined to spend my life wandering aimlessly. I can’t settle down. The cruel part is, I want to settle down and the world won’t let me. So what choice do I have but to become a fugitive?
Reflection may be essential to a scholar, but it’s taboo in social intercourse.
People may make fun of me because I’m wearing something odd, but it’s still good to be alive.
Living as I do with human beings, the more that I observe them, the more I am forced to conclude that they are selfish.
There was nothing so very unfamiliar about the excitement she was feeling, and yet it felt always like a new excitement. It was, in other words, a perennially unfamiliar feeling.
Words are not meant to stir the air only: they are capable of moving greater things.
There was a large crowd around us, and every face in it looked happy. We had little opportunity to talk until we reached the woods, where there were no flowers and no people.
I am a lonely man,’ Sensei said. ‘And so I am glad that you come to see me. But I am also a melancholy man, and so I asked you why you should wish to visit me so often.
Over the wintry forest, winds howl in rage with no leaves to blow.
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.
He was grand in his convictions. He would stride forward to meet his own destruction.
I thought of the new stone, of my new wife, and of the newly buried white bones beneath us, and I felt that fate had made sport of us all.
Your addiction to thinking will come back to haunt you.
No matter how full one’s head might be with the image of greatness, one was useless, I found out, unless one was a worthy man first.
On the whole, all people are good, or at least they’re normal. The frightening thing is that they can suddenly turn bad when it comes to the crunch.
[T]he very color of the air in the place I was born was different, the smell of the earth was special, redolent with memories of my parents.
All you do is think. Because all you do is think, you’ve constructed two separate worlds—one inside your head and one outside. Just the fact that you tolerate this enormous dissonance—why, that’s a great intangible failure already.
He framed a question inwardly to his vanity: ‘Will this be tougher than I thought?
Anyone who sang the praises of undying love in this day and age belonged to the first rank of hypocrites in Daisuke’s estimate.