Quotes by Japanese Authors - Page 18

People do change. And no matter how close we once were, and how much we opened up to each other, maybe neither if us know anything substantial about the other.
Haruki Murakami
People do change. And no matter how close we once were, and how much we opened up to each other, maybe neither of us know anything substantial about the other.
Haruki Murakami
In ancient times, people weren't just male or female, but one of three types: male/male, male/female, female/female. In other words, each person was made out of the components of two people. Everyone was happy with this arrangement and never really gave it much a thought. But then God took a knife and cut everybody in half, right down the middle. So after that the world was divided just into male and female, the upshot being that people spend their time running around trying to locate their missing other half.
Haruki Murakami
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.
Sōseki Natsume
If you have to choose between something that has form and something that doesn't, go for the one without form. That's my rule.
Haruki Murakami
(...) 6,400,099,980 moments that constitute a single day. His point is that every single one of those moments provides an opportunity to reestablish our will. Even the snap of a finger, he says, provides us with sixty-five opportunities to wake up and to choose actions that will produce beneficial karma and turn our lives around.
Ruth Ozeki
We all believe we can choose our own path from among the many alternatives. But perhaps it’s more accurate to say that we make the choice unconsciously. I think I did – but now I knew it because now I was able to put it into words. But I don’t mean this in the fatalistic sense; we’re constantly making choices. With the breaths we take every day, with the expression in our eyes, with the daily actions we do over and over, we decide as though by instinct. And so some of us will inevitably find ourselves rolling around in a puddle on some roof in a strange place with a takeout katsudon in the middle of winter, looking up at the night sky, as if it were the most natural thing in the world.
Banana Yoshimoto
I'm still not sure I made the right choice when I told my wife about the bakery attack.But then,it might not have been a question of right or wrong. Which is to say that wrong choices can produce right results, and vice versa. I myself have adopted the position that,in fact, we never choose anything at all. Things happen. Or not.
Haruki Murakami
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
A cell is just a room if you don't lock the door.
Haruki Murakami
Energies expended on sideshows, never on the main event. Where the hell was the main event? Was there a main event?
Haruki Murakami
My brand new sandals are a little stiff, and I think they'll give me blisters. But I love them, so I'll probably wear them out.With cautious feet, we move forward. Today is the first step of our new lives.
Inio Asano
Did not Socrates, all the while he unflinchingly refused to concede one iota of loyalty to his daemon, obey with equal fidelity and equanimity the command of his earthly master, the State? His conscience he followed, alive; his country he served, dying. Alack the day when a state grows so powerful as to demand of its citizens the dictates of their consciences!
Inazo Nitobe
We're supposed to strive for harmony, and that's what the art of tea is supposed to accomplish... but harmony is very, very difficult to achieve in this country. Tea ceremony is powerless. But it's also not such a bad thing either. You should enjoy it while you can.
Koushun Takami
Character is beyond obligation. You could kick your shoes off at the door, flick your cigarete butts onto the sidewalk or talk only in slang, those things are forgivable if you have character
Novala Takemoto
First character, then ability.
Shinichi Suzuki
All at once it was just too much, and Harvey felt something about to snap. He drew back into the shadowy side of the doorway, out of site. Then he slid down the wall to the ground and put his palm over his mouth to hold in his breath and his feelings both. He'd forced in more air then he could hold, and his lungs were burning. More importantly, his heart hurt... He wished he hadn't eavesdropped.
Yukako Kabei
These feelings...the ugly feelings in my heart...should have been blown away...and buried deep in the sands...
Rei Tōma
There are many days when all the awful things that happen make you sick at heart, when the path before you is so steep you can’t bear to look. Not even love can rescue a person from that.
Banana Yoshimoto
I wished my heart would break and get it over with.
Banana Yoshimoto
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
Stab the body and it heals, but injure the heart and the wound lasts a lifetime.
Mineko Iwasaki
...I don't think that. I believe we're going to win.' - Hime'On what grounds do you think that?' - Mitchi'There are no grounds, but...it's because I won't let anyone tell me that it's impossible. If I myself think that it's impossible, then I can't win. That's why I only believe myself and say... I can do it.' - Hime
Maki Minami
Change yourself, and others will follow.
Kentetsu Takamori
My words did not seem to reach her. Or, if they did, she was unable to grasp their meaning.
Haruki Murakami
I don't know, it's stupid being 20," she said. "I'm just not ready. It feels weird. Like somebody's pushing me from behind.
Haruki Murakami
I don't deserve a girl like Hatsumi," Nagasawa once said to me. I had to agree with him.
Haruki Murakami
She was seriously in love, but she never made demands.
Haruki Murakami
I do wish men, when they're taking their leave from a lady at dawn, wouldn't insist on adjusting their clothes to a nicety, or fussily tying their lacquered cap securely into place. After all, who would laugh at a man or criticize him if they happened to catch sight of him on his way home from an assignation in fearful disarray, with his cloak or hunting costume all awry?
Sei Shōnagon
...But it is also told that Niuka forgot to fill two tiny crevices in the blue firmament. Thus began the dualism of love--two souls rolling through space and never at rest until they join together to complete the universe. Everyone has to build anew his sky of hope and peace.
Kakuzō Okakura
In this world
Hidekaz Himaruya
People are not two-thirds one thing and the remainder something else. Temperament, personality, or outlook don’t divide quite like that. The bits don’t separate clearly. You end up a funny homogeneous mixture. This is something that will become more common in the latter part of the century—people with mixed cultural backgrounds, and mixed racial backgrounds. That’s the way the world is going.
Kazuo Ishiguro
Sorel's basic character flaws had all cemented by the age of fifteen, a fact which further elicited my sympathy. To have all the building blocks of your life in place by that age was, by any standard, a tragedy. It was as good as sealing yourself into a dungeon. Walled in, with nowhere to go but your own doom. Walls. A world completely surrounded by walls.
Haruki Murakami
Most whites do not have a racial identity, but they would do well to understand what race means for others. They should also ponder the consequences of being the only group for whom such an identity is forbidden and who are permitted no aspirations as a group.
Jared Taylor
It’s a real handicap to have a face with shifty eyes.
Kōbō Abe
Sometimes I just get tired. I get headaches, and I just lose track. I mean, it's like which is me and which is the role? Where's the line between me and my shadow?
Haruki Murakami
I feel very strongly that all Japanese at that time had the idea drilled into them of 1999 being the end of the world. Aum renunciates have already accepted, inside themselves, the end of the world, because when they become a renunciate, they discard themselves totally, thereby abandoning the world. In other words, Aum is a collection of people who have accepted the end. People who continue to hold out hope for the near future still have an attachment to the world. If you have attachments, you will not discard your Self, but for Renunciates it's as if they've leaped right off the cliff. And taking a giant leap like that feels good. They lose something - but gain something in return.
Haruki Murakami
Were the stars out when I left the house last evening? All I could remember was the couple in the Skyline listening to Duran Duran. Stars? Who remembers stars? Come to think of it, had I even looked up at the sky recently? Had the stars been wiped out of the sky three months ago, I wouldn't have known. The only things I noticed were silver bracelets on women's wrists and popsicle sticks in potted rubber plants. There had to be something wrong with my life. I should have been born a Yugoslavian shepherd who looked up at the Big Dipper every night. No car, no car stereo, no silver bracelets, no shuffling, no dark blue tweed suits.My world foreshortened, flattening into a credit card. Seen head on, things seemed merely skewed, but from the side the view was virtually meaningless—a one-dimensional wafer. Everything about me may have been crammed in there, but it was only plastic. Indecipherable except to some machine.My first circuit must have been wearing thin. My real memories were receding into planar projection, the screen of consciousness losing all identity.
Haruki Murakami
The universe is a symphony of strings. And the "Mind of God," which Einstein wrote eloquently about, is cosmic music resonating throughout hyperspace.
Michio Kaku
Inflation is continuous and eternal, with big bangs happening all the time, with universes sprouting from other universes. In this picture, universes can “bud” off into other universes, creating a “multiverse.” In this theory, spontaneous breaking may occur anywhere within our universe, allowing an entire universe to bud off our universe. It also means that our own universe might have budded from a previous universe. In the chaotic inflationary model, the multiverse is eternal, even if individual universes are not. Some universes may have a very large Omega, in which case they immediately vanish into a big crunch after their big bang. Some universes only have a tiny Omega and expand forever. Eventually, the multiverse becomes dominated by those universes that inflate by a huge amount.In retrospect, the idea of parallel universes is forced upon us.
Michio Kaku
Who would then deny that when I am sipping tea in my tearoom I am swallowing the whole universe with it and that this very moment of my lifting the bowl to my lips is eternity itself transcending time and space?
D.T. Suzuki
Although some of the people at church rejected and even denounced me, this did not particularly hinder me in my search. Rather, the fact that there were church people as weak and foolish as I was myself gave me a deep sense of reassurance. Arrogantly I thought, 'If God accepts that sort of person, isn't it possible thatHe will even accept me?' And I began to read the Bible more attentively.
Ayako Miura
...having nothing better to do, meandered off to a coffee shop and sat facing each other for a couple of hours, neither of them talking much but each coming to the general conclusion that the other was a person rather like himself...
Ryū Murakami
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
ChrysanthemumSilence - monk Sips his morning tea.
Bashō Matsuo
Behind the depressing silence of the sea, the silence of God …. the feeling that while men raise their voices in anguish God remains with folded arms, silent.
Shūsaku Endō
It was a stillness so profound one had to adjust one’s hearing to it.....The silence seemed to be trying to tell him something about itself.
Haruki Murakami
I shouted into the phone, but there was no reply. Silence floated up from the receiver like smoke from the mouth of a gun.
Haruki Murakami
A moderate silence ensued. A neutral-to-slightly-positive silence. True, silence is still silence, except when you think about it too much.
Haruki Murakami
The silence is so deep it hurts our ears
Haruki Murakami
I said nothing for a time, just ran my fingertips along the edge of the human-shaped emptiness that had been left inside me.
Haruki Murakami
If 22 bushels (1,300 pounds) of rice and 22 bushels of winter grain are harvested from a quarter acre field, then the field will support five to ten people each investing an average of less than one hour of labour per day. But if the field were turned over to pasturage, or if the grain were fed to cattle, only one person could be supported per quarter acre. Meat becomes a luxury food when its production requires land which could provide food directly for human consumption. This has been shown clearly and definitely. Each person should ponder seriously how much hardship he is causing by indulging in food so expensively produced.
Masanobu Fukuoka
Kyoya: I don't like this food. But do you think I'd be so inhuman as to complain after you treated me? That's a rude assumption.
Bisco Hatori
A natural person can achieve right diet because his instinct is in proper working order. He is satisfied with simple food; it is nutritious, tastes good, and is useful daily medicine. Food and the human spirit are united.
Fukuoka
The foods that are nearby are best for human beings, and things that he has to struggle to obtain turn out to be the least beneficial of all.
Fukuoka
Food and medicine are not two different things: they are the front and back of one body. Chemically grown vegetables may be eaten for food, but they cannot be used as medicine.
Masanobu Fukuoka
At first people ate simply because they were alive and because food was tasty. Modern people have come to think that if they do not prepare food with elaborate seasonings, the meal will be tasteless. If you do not try to make food delicious, you will find that nature has made it so.
Masanobu Fukuoka
Until there is a reversal of the sense of values which cares more for size and appearance than for quality, there will be no solving the problem of food pollution.
Masanobu Fukuoka
Yin and yang are the left and right hands of the Infinite — creator, destroyer, and reproducer of everything that exists.
George Ohsawa
A mere two days without eating and you passed out. It must be tough not being able to photosynthesize.
Tsutomu Nihei