Quotes by Japanese Authors

You could say that everything had become weirdly distorted because I'd broken the rules so many times.
Fuminori Nakamura
Texting and phone calls, fireworks, blends, café au lait, and music. Yesterday's television. Work and beer. The neighbor's dog, or those strange flowers, the way it smells at Maisen. Those ordinary things I talk about with you. With you... I want to talk about love with you.
Tomoko Yamashita
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
I was living for one thing only, and that was to confirm my own lack of feeling.
Haruki Murakami
In some sense, gravity does not exist; what moves the planets and the stars is the distortion of space and time.
Michio Kaku
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
Spirals.... this town is contaminated with spirals.
Junji Ito
I could feel a small polished stone sinking through the darkest waters of my heart. All those deep convoluted channels and passageways, and yet she managed to toss her pebble right down to the bottom of it all.
Haruki Murakami
But thats their image of us so we stay tense, holding our breath, hoping we wont be found out. - about being gay from the film Love My Life
Ebine Yamaji
A friend to kill time is a friend sublime.
Haruki Murakami
Sheer effort enables those with nothing to surpass those with priviledge and position.
Toyotomi Hideyoshi
Sheer effort enables those with nothing to surpass those with privilege and position.
Toyotomi Hideyoshi
Nothing is less trustworthy than a woman's tears.
Wataru Watari
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
Chained inside the carriage is a sinful woman. When we set the carriage afire, her flesh will be roasted, her bones will be charred: she will die an agonizing death. Never again will you have such a perfect model for the screen. Do not fail to watch as her snow-white flesh erupts in flames. See and remember her long black hair dancing in a whirl of sparks!
Ryūnosuke Akutagawa
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
I never had what it takes to make a first-rate anything.''That's wrong,' she declared. 'Everyone must have one thing that they can excel at. It's just a matter of drawing it out, isn't it?' But school doesn't know how to draw it out. It crushes the gift. It's no wonder most people never get to be what they want to be. They just get ground down.
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
Until I met you," she said, "I never realized how precious each day could be. When I was working, each day was over before I knew it, and then a week just flew by, and then a whole year...What have I been doing all this time? Why didn't I meet you before? If I had to choose a whole year in the past, or a day with you-I'd choose a day with you...
Shūichi Yoshida
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
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
Radical space technologies never reach the public because unknown groups do not wish humanity to have access to the highest knowledge or the most advanced scientific inventions. Perhaps this suppression is out of fear that the masses may be able to explore our Solar System and the Universe beyond it. Whatever the case, it seems they want us to stay at ignorant levels forever.
Takaaki Musha
The world’s governments have many classified layers and outsiders rarely gain access to their hidden secrets. And certainly no common man can get confirmation of the existence of exotic technologies.
Takaaki Musha
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
Maybe we tried to leave as much memories of ourselves with each other because we knew one day we wouldn't be together any more.
Makoto Shinkai
For ten years after the atomic bomb was dropped there was so little public discussion of the bomb or of radioactivity that even the Chugoku Shinbun, the major newspaper of the city where the atomic bomb was dropped, did not have the movable type for 'atomic bomb' or 'radioactivity'. The silence continued so long because the U.S. Army Surgeons Investigation Team in the fall of 1945 had issued a mistaken statement: all people expected to die from the radiation effects of the atomic bomb had by then already died; accordingly, no further cases of physiological effects due to residual radiation would be acknowledged.
Kenzaburō Ōe
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
Once the ego is born into this world, it has to shoulder morality.
Haruki Murakami
Hatred will never be erased! The only thing you can do... is erase the ones you hate. - Hakuryuu
Shinobu Ohtaka
Every once in a while she'll get worked up and cry like that. But that's ok. She's letting her feelings out. The scary thing is not being able to do that. Then your feelings build up and harden and die inside. That's when you're in big trouble.
Haruki Murakami
I just didn't want to be a loser anymore...-Mitsuko Souma
Koushun Takami
Everything in this world exists to wear you down.
Tite Kubo
Daisuke was of course equipped with conversation that, even if they went further, would allow him to retreat as if nothing had happened. He had always wondered at the conversations recorded in Western novels, for to him they were too bald, too self indulgent, and moreover, too unsubtly rich. However they read in the original, he thought they reflected a taste that could not be translated into Japanese. Therefore, he had not the slightest intention of using imported phrases to develop his relationship with Michiyo. Between the two of them at least, ordinary words sufficed perfectly well. But the danger was of slipping from point A to point B without realizing it. Daisuke managed to stand his ground only by a hair's breadth. When he left, Michiyo saw him to the entranceway and said, "Do come again, please? It's so lonely.
Sōseki Natsume