What I’m not sure about, is if our lives have been so different from the lives of the people we save. We all complete. Maybe none of us really understand what we’ve lived through, or feel we’ve had enough time.
Poor creatures. What did we do to you? With all our schemes and plans?
There was another life that I might have had, but I am having this one.
It had never occurred to me that our lives, which had been so closely interwoven, could unravel with such speed.
If you are under the impression you have already perfected yourself, you will never rise to the heights you are no doubt capable of.
One is not struck by the truth until prompted quite accidentally by some external event.
I think of my pile of old paperbacks, their pages gone wobbly, like they’d once belonged to the sea.
Where once we fought for land and God, we now fought to avenge fallen comrades, themselves slaughtered in vengeance. Where could it end? Babes growing to men knowing only days of war.
The stranger thought it might be God himself had forgotten much from our pasts, events far distant, events of the same day. And if a thing is not in God’s mind, then what chance of it remaining in those of mortal men?
It was like there was some parallel universe we all vanished off to where we had all this sex.
I needed to get familiar with sex, and it would be just as well to practise first with a boy I didn’t care about too much. Then later on, if I was with someone special, I’d have more chance of doing everything right.
I think genre rules should be porous, if not nonexistent.
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.
This country awakens so many memories, though each seems like some restless sparrow I know will flee any moment into the breeze.
Memory, I realize, can be an unreliable thing; often it is heavily coloured by the circumstances in which one remembers, and no doubt this applies to certain of the recollections I have gathered here.
The truth is, Japan is headed for crisis. We are in the hands of greedy businessmen and weak politicians. Such people will see to it poverty grows every day.
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.
when we were eleven, say, we really weren’t interested in each other’s poems at all. . . . But we didn’t know a thing about poetry. We didn’t care about it.
The earlier years – the ones I’ve just been telling you about – they tend to blur into each other as a kind of golden time, and when I think about them at all, even the not-so-great things, I can’t help feeling a sort of glow.
Sometimes I get so immersed in my own company, if I unexpectedly run into someone I know, it’s a bit of a shock and takes me a while to adjust.
Democracy is a fine thing. But that doesn’t mean citizens have a right to run riot whenever they disagree with something.#Page: 120
What I mean is, right from that first time, there wassomething in Tommy’s manner that was tinged with sadness, that seemed tosay: “Yes, we’re doing this now and I’m glad we’re doing it now. But what apity we left it so late.
An artist’s concern is to capture beauty wherever he finds it.
Revolution? Really, Ono! The communists want a revolution. We want nothing of the sort. Quite the opposite, in fact. We wish for a restoration.
Maybe all of us at Hailsam had little secrets like that — little private nooks created out of thin air where we could go off alone without fears and longing.
Its was one of those events which at a crucial stage in one’s development arrive to challenge and stretch one to the limit of one’s ability and beyond, so that thereafter one has a new standard by which to judge oneself.
When it was too late for rescue, it was still early enough for revenge.
When my own time comes, will I too long for the sea? I think I will be content enough with the soil. And I will not demand the exact spot, but let it be within this country Horace and I have spent the years roaming contentedly.
How so much honourable is such a contest, in which one’s moral conduct and achievement are brought as witnesses rather than the size of one’s purse.#Page: 10
It might be just some trend that came and went,’ I said. ‘But for us, it’s our life.
Our life together’s like a tale with a happy end, no matter what turns it took in the way.
I loved cowboy films and TV series, and I learned bits of English from them. My favorite was ‘Laramie’, with Robert Fuller and John Smith. I used to watch ‘The Lone Ranger’, which had been famous in Japan as well. I idolized these cowboys.
When you become a parent, or a teacher, you turn into a manager of this whole system. You become the person controlling the bubble of innocence around a child, regulating it.
I discovered that my imagination came alive when I moved away from the immediate world around me.