Quotes by Japanese Authors

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
People make a great deal of the flowers of spring and the leaves of autumn, but for me a night like this, with a clear moon shining on snow, is the best -- and there is not a trace of color in it. I cannot describe the effect it has on me, weird and unearthly somehow. I do not understand people who find a winter evening forbidding.
Murasaki Shikibu
What is this?! I couldn't die back when I would've been glad to die anywhere, anytime, but now that dying would take hardly any effort, suddenly I can't afford to yet? What the hell am I supposed to do?
Yukako Kabei
Sometimes I wish I could describe how wonderful I feel in those few seconds from the time he spreads his arms above his head, as if trying to grab hold of something, to the instant he vanishes into the water. But I can never find the right words. Perhaps it’s because he’s falling through time, to a place where words can never reach.
Yōko Ogawa
I am the Hero of Time. No matter where or when I am, I will fight for Hyrule... and for Princess Zelda.
Akira Himekawa
Roy: "Looks like it's starting to rain"Riza: "But..It's not raining..."Roy: "Yes it is. This is the rain.
Hiromu Arakawa
Even when the moon shrinks and disappears, it shows itself again gradually. When ancient people saw that eternal cycle of death and recovery, they prayed to the moon for their own rebirth. Rebirth. Will I be reborn? ... If I were reborn, what would I become?
Fuminori Nakamura
Miroku: Kagome, are you worrying about me?Kagome: I guess so.Miroku: In that case, I have a favor to ask of you: please bear my child.
Rumiko Takahashi
A friend to kill time is a friend sublime.
Haruki Murakami
Sheer effort enables those with nothing to surpass those with privilege and position.
Toyotomi Hideyoshi
Sheer effort enables those with nothing to surpass those with priviledge and position.
Toyotomi Hideyoshi
Give them back! Give my tears back, right now——with interest!!
Natsuki Takaya
Hatsuharu Sohma: [after tripping Kyo] If I hadn't had tripped you you wouldn't have stopped now would you. [addressing the audience] Hatsuharu Sohma: By the way what I just did was very dangerous. And if it had been anyone but Kyo they probably would have been hurt pretty badly so don't try it at home. Kyo Sohma: Don't try it here and who are you even talking to
Natsuki Takaya
Now that I think about it, this might all have been inevitable. The reason we all ended up here, the reason I couldn't leave her alone...it all had to be a ridiculous fairy tale.
Jun Mochizuki
The Professor never really seemed to care whether we figured out the right answer to a problem. He preferred our wild, desperate guesses to silence, and he was even more delighted when those guesses led to new problems that took us beyond the original one. He had a special feeling for what he called the "correct miscalculation," for he believed that mistakes were often as revealing as the right answers.
Yōko Ogawa
We amass material things for the same reason that we eat - to satisfy a craving. Buying on impulse and eating and drinking to excess are attempts to alleviate stress. From observing my clients, I have noticed that when they discard excess clothing, their tummies tend to slim down, when they discard books and documents, their minds become clearer, when they reduce the number of cosmetics and tidy up the area around the sink and bath, their complexion tends to become clear and their skin smooth. -p226
Marie Kondō
Dying in the line of duty is heroic, but dying while unemployed is just stupid.
Tsugumi Ohba
When you beat a drum, you create NOW, when silence becomes a sound so enormous and alive it feels like you're breathing in the clouds and the sky, and your heart is the rain and the thunder.
Ruth Ozeki
The ocean was one of the greatest things he had ever seen in his life—bigger and deeper than anything he had imagined. It changed its color and shape and expression according to time and place and weather. It aroused a deep sadness in his heart, and at the same time it brought his heart peace and comfort.
Haruki Murakami
Every man possesses the Buddha-nature. Do not demean yourselves.
Dōgen
He sure told you off, huh, Icy?" ~Darcy
VIZ Media
The sky grew darker, painted blue on blue, one stroke at a time, into deeper and deeper shades of night.
Haruki Murakami
In my opinion, if 100% of the people were farming it would be ideal. If each person were given one quarter-acre, that is 1 1/4 acres to a family of five, that would be more than enough land to support the family for the whole year. If natural farming were practiced, a farmer would also have plenty of time for leisure and social activities within the village community. I think this is the most direct path toward making this country a happy, pleasant land.
Masanobu Fukuoka
I shall now express my utter disgust and anger with you through the piano.
Akira Sasanuma
You know... the word "homeless", gives you this very negative image. A filthy raggedy hobo... it's no good. It's too demeaning of a word if you ask me. It's just not politically correct enough... If it were up to me, I'd rather we be called "residentially challenged
Nobuyuki Fukumoto
Bushido as an independent code of ethics may vanish, but its power will not perish from the earth; its schools of martial prowess or civic honor may be demolished, but its light and its glory will long survive their ruins. Like its symbolic flower, after it is blown to the four winds, it will still bless mankind with the perfume with which it will enrich life.
Inazo Nitobe
In every motions to put colors on my canvas, I feel like I am screaming, "I AM HERE"... To whom?.. To where?... Where am I going to...?
Hiroko Sakai
To break free from this vexatious and awful never-ending cycle, this flood of outrageous thoughts, and to long for nothing more than simply to sleep--how clean, how pure, the mere thought of it is exhilarating.
Osamu Dazai
Now she realized that she was not peering at a so-dark-blue-it-looked-black ocean, but rather she was looking straight through miles of incredibly clear water at something enormous and black in its nethermost depths. Maybe it was the bottom--so deep that not even light could touch it.And yet, down in those impossible depths, she thought she could see tiny lights sparkling. She stared uncertainly at the tiny glimmerings. They seemed almost like scattered grains of sand lit from within; in some places they clustered like colonies, faint and twinkling.Like stars...
Fuyumi Ono
A maggot is just another life form.
Shinmon Aoki
Each instant brought them, more momentous than the explosion of Krakatoa. It was only that no one noticed. We are to accustomed to the absurdity of existence. The loss of a universe is not worth taking seriously.
Yukio Mishima
Might it have been nothing but life itself? Life; this limitless complex sea, filled with assorted flotsam, brimming with capricious, violent, and yet eternally transparent blues and greens.
Yukio Mishima
Well, you're right. I'm a Freak.""Huh?""I love being bullied. Being hit and kicked by others gets me totally excited. That's what kind of freak I am.Sorry if that bothers you.
Yuna Kagesaki
Nobody chooses to evolve. It's like floods and avalanches and earthquakes. You never know what's happening until they hit, then it's too late.
Haruki Murakami
A delayed game is eventually good, a bad game is bad forever.
Shigeru Miyamoto
I took the life of the woman I was supposed to call mother in the process of being born... in order to become the world's strongest shinobi... an incarnation of sand was implanted inside of me...
Masashi Kishimoto
I want to take one last journey together, just the three of us, and go back to Easterbury… and let the Corporal relax and rest in peace. I’ll be with you, Kieli, I’ll still be with you… Won’t that do…?
Yukako Kabei
Samsa looked down in dismay at his naked body. How ill-formed it was! Worse than ill-formed. It possessed no means of self-defense. Smooth white skin (covered by only a perfunctory amount of hair) with fragile blue blood vessels visible through it; a soft, unprotected belly; ludicrous, impossibly shaped genitals; gangly arms and legs (just two of each!); a scrawny, breakable neck; an enormous, misshapen head with a tangle of stiff hair on its crown; two absurd ears, jutting out like a pair of seashells. Was this thing really him? Could a body so preposterous, so easy to destroy (no shell for protection, no weapons for attack), survive in the world?
Haruki Murakami
Hatred will never be erased! The only thing you can do... is erase the ones you hate. - Hakuryuu
Shinobu Ohtaka
I just didn't want to be a loser anymore...-Mitsuko Souma
Koushun Takami
There's a need, too, for a special name in order to distinguish between this present world and the former world in which the police carried old-fashioned revolvers. ... 1Q84 - that's what I'll call this new world. Q is for 'question mark'. A world that bears a question.
Haruki Murakami
Being insulted by a smart-mouthed little punk like you.. really pisses me off!
Sui Ishida
Kira is evil ... There's no denying that ... But lately I've been starting to think of it more like this ... The real evil is the power to kill people. Someone who finds himself with that power is cursed. No matter how you use it, anything obtained by killing people can never bring true happiness.
Tsugumi Ohba
I hurt myself deeply, though at the time I had no idea how deeply. I should have learned many things from that experience, but when I look back on it, all I gained was one single, undeniable fact. That ultimately I am a person who can do evil. I never consciously tried to hurt anyone, yet good intentions notwithstanding, when necessity demanded, I could become completely self-centred, even cruel. I was the kind of person who could, using some plausible excuse, inflict on a person I cared for a wound that would never heal.
Haruki Murakami
My father used to say that when he was growing up the water was clear and there were tons of fireflies everywhere... He felt sorry for the kids growing up today... But it is really beautiful... Time will just keep on passing... we'll get old... and look back on the past. I hope we can always say... how great things were.
Fuyumi Soryo
It is not memories but the person we have become because of those past experiences that we should treasure. This is the lesson these keepsakes teach us when we sort them. The space in which we live should be for the person we are becoming now, not the person we were in the past. P.118
Marie Kondō
But like a boat with a twisted rudder, I kept coming back to the same place. I wasn't going anywhere. I was myself, waiting on the shore for me to return. Was that so depressing?Who knows? Maybe that was 'despair.' What Turgenev called 'disillusionment.' Or Dostoyevsky, 'hell.' Or Somerset Maugham, 'reality.' Whatever the label, I figured it was me.
Haruki Murakami
If you feel lost, disappointed, hesitant, or weak, return to yourself, to who you are, here and now and when you get there, you will discover yourself, like a lotus flower in full bloom, even in a muddy pond, beautiful and strong.
Masaru Emoto
You're a bad man who made her pound a shot of Jäger.
Yuhta Nishio
It would take a civilization far more advanced than ours, unbelievably advanced, to begin to manipulate negative energy to create gateways to the past. But if you could obtain large quantities of negative energy—and that's a big “IF”—then you could create a time machine that apparently obeys Einstein's equation and perhaps the laws of quantum theory.
Michio Kaku
They say that when people still rode on vehicles powered by oil, they could go anywhere they wanted.
Yoshiyuki Sadamoto
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
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
The weaker you are the louder you bark.-Tenten
Masashi Kishimoto
Reflection may be essential to a scholar, but it’s taboo in social intercourse.
Sōseki Natsume
If there is a hard, high wall and an egg that breaks against it, no matter how right the wall or how wrong the egg, I will stand on the side of the egg. Why? Because each of us is an egg, a unique soul enclosed in a fragile egg. Each of us is confronting a high wall. The high wall is the system which forces us to do the things we would not ordinarily see fit to do as individuals . . . We are all human beings, individuals, fragile eggs. We have no hope against the wall: it's too high, too dark, too cold. To fight the wall, we must join our souls together for warmth, strength. We must not let the system control us -- create who we are. It is we who created the system. (Jerusalem Prize acceptance speech, JERUSALEM POST, Feb. 15, 2009)
Haruki Murakami
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
He's not god! He's just the asshole who fucks with us.
Satoshi Kon
Yotsuba: I’ll get revenge! … I’m going! Jumbo (in a suffering manner): Yotsuba… please, come back alive… Yotsuba (heroic): Alright. Even if I die… I’ll come back alive.—–Yotsuba!
Kiyohiko Azuma
i wish you could understand me, but of course it is not the way of this world that we are ever completely understood.
Murasaki Shikibu