Quotes by Japanese Authors - Page 28

Better to be caught in sudden, complete catastrophe than to be gnawed by the cancer of imagination.
Yukio Mishima
You're afraid of imagination. And even more afraid of dreams. Afraid of the responsibility that begins in dreams. But you have to sleep, and dreams are a part of sleep. When you're awake you can suppress imagination. But you can't suppress dreams.
Haruki Murakami
Still, though, I can't be sure if the zoo as I recall it was really like that. How can I put it? I sometimes feel that it's too vivid, if you know what I mean. And when I start having thoughts like this, the more I think about it, the less I can tell how much of the vividness is real and how much of it my imagination has invented. I feel as if I've wandered into a labyrinth. Has that ever happened to you?
Haruki Murakami
The ones with no imagination are always the quickest to justify themselves
Haruki Murakami
Yet the misty spring rain softened the outline of the mountain across the river and made it even more beautiful. So gentle was the rain that they hardly knew they were getting wet as they strolled back toward the car, not even bothering to put up their umbrella. The slender threads of rain vanished into the river without a ripple. Cherry blossoms were intermingled with young green leaves, the colours of the budding trees all delicately subdued in the rain.
Yasunari Kawabata
See that house with the Ivy on it? From that rooftop, what if you leapt onto the next rooftop, dashed over that blue & green wall, climbed and jumped up the pipe, ran across the roof and jumped to the next? You can, in animation.If you could walk along the cable, you could see the other side. When you look from above, so many things reveal themselves to you. Maybe race along the concrete wall. Suddenly, there in your humdrum town there is a magical movie. Isn’t it fun to see things that way? Feels like you could go somewhere far beyond……maybe you can…
Hayao Miyazaki
Possibility, or what we refer to as imagination, is 99% imitation. The real deal is only 1%. The problem is, this 1% is simultaneously referred to as Evil.
Kouhei Kadono
I just gave them a little scare. A touch of psychological terror. As Joseph Conrad once wrote, true terror is the kind that men feel towards their imagination. (from Super-frog Saves Tokyo)
Haruki Murakami
Imagine the clouds drippingDig a hole in your garden to put them in
Yoko Ono
The whole terrible fight occured in the area of imagination. That is the precise location of our battlefield. It is there, that we experience our victories and defeats.
Haruki Murakami
She always wanted to believe in things.
Kazuo Ishiguro
Am I crazy?" she asked. "I feel like I am sometimes." "Maybe," he said, rubbing her forehead. "But don't worry about it. You need to be a little bit crazy. Crazy is the price you pay for having an imagination. It's your superpower. Tapping into the dream. It's a good thing not a bad thing.
Ruth Ozeki
Since I'm a novelist I'm the opposite of you - I believe that what's most important is what cannot be measured. I'm not denying your way of thinking, but the greater part of people's lives consist of things that are unmeasurable, and trying to change all these to something measurable is realistically impossible.
Haruki Murakami
It might be a little silly for someone getting to be my age to put this into words, but I just want to make sure I get the facts down clearly : I'm the kind of person who likes to be by himself. To put a finer point on it, I'm the type of person who doesn't find it painful to be alone. I find spending an hour or two everyday running alone, not speaking to anyone as well as four of five hours at my desk, to be neither difficult or boring.
Haruki Murakami
Don't be so quick to throw away your life. No matter how disgraceful or embarrassing it may be, you need to keep struggling to find your way out until the very end.
Norihiro Yagi
...the reason is that when we look at nature, we receive a sort of permission to be alive in this world...
Naoki Higashida
Life itself is a frightening image for every human being.... being strong in life isn't easy.
Inuyasha
Happiness is as fragile and fleeting as a bubble soap. Water down the last dregs of happiness and turn them into bubbles to fill the void. It may nothing more than an illusion, but it was still better than the emptiness.
Kanae Minato
To have some deep feeling about Buddhism is not the point; we just do what we should do, like eating supper and going to bed. This is Buddhism.
Shunryu Suzuki
I could disappear from the face of the earth, and the world would go on moving without the slightest twinge. Things were tremendously complicated, to be sure, but one thing was clear: no one needed me.
Haruki Murakami
I'd like to have a good long talk with you once you've calmed down. Please call me soon. Happy Birthday.
Haruki Murakami
Then, all but instinctively, I took her in my arms. Pressed against me, her whole body trembling, she continued to cry without a sound.
Haruki Murakami
Madoka: I want to erase the tears of all those who trusted in hope. I want them to be left with a smile on their faces.
Magica Quartet
Nights without work I spent with whisky and books.
Haruki Murakami
He stopped complaining, but now I was annoyed. I went to the roof and drank alone.
Haruki Murakami
She and I were bound together at the border between life and death. It was like that for us from the start
Haruki Murakami
Tell me, Nana,If for example we had been a love couple,Would a hug have been enough to wash away my sadness?Or then; does every single being carry this loneliness, like a burden?I wans't intending to monopolizing youI just wanted you to need me.
Ai Yazawa
By just living one’s life, sadness accumulates here and there, be it in the blankets hung out in the sun to dry, the toothbrushes in the bathroom, and the phone history logs.
Makoto Shinkai
By just living one’s life, sadness accumulates here and there, be it in the sheets hung out in the sun to dry, the toothbrushes in the bathroom, and the history logs of the mobile phone…In the last several years, I have forged ahead without any regard, just to touch what I cannot reach. Without understanding the sources from which this menacing thought surged forth from, I continued working. When I at last noticed, my heart had already become hard from the gradual loss of its youthful vitality. And on certain morning, when I at last came to an earnest realization that I had lost everything that was beautiful, I knew I was at my limits and quit the company.
Makoto Shinkai
April and May were painful, lonely months for me because I couldn't talk to you. I never knew that spring could be so painful and lonely. Better to have three Februaries than a spring like this.
Haruki Murakami
Besides being the world the kind of sadness that can not be expressed in tears. You can not explain it to anyone. Unable to take any shape, settles quietly in the bottom of the heart as snow during the windless night.
Haruki Murakami
I go about saying how pained and tormented, how lonely and sad I feel, but what do I really mean by that? If I were to speak the truth, I would die.
Osamu Dazai
I yearned for everything long gone.
Osamu Dazai
Hate is a place where a man who can't stand sadness goes
Kentaro Miura
Thinking about spaghetti that boils eternally but is never done is a sad, sad thing.
Haruki Murakami
Ceaseless as the interminable voices of the bell-cricket, all night till dawn my tears flow.
Murasaki Shikibu
This is my sin for giving in to my own weaknesses. My heart just couldn't keep up with the gigantic gap between dreams and reality. -Jellal Fernandes
Hiro Mashima
When I was little, I was out riding my brand-new blue bicycle when I decided to see how far I could keep going without looking back even once. I could feel with my back how my neighborhood was receding, further and further away... but I kept pedaling with all my might, my mind almost going blank. All I could hear was the sound of my own heart, thumping wildly in my ears. Even now, I remember it sometimes. What exactly was I trying to do that day? What was it that I wanted to prove?It's no good. My mind just keeps fogging over. I have this irritating sound stuck in my head. What is it? This sound... Ohh... I know what it is. This is... the sound of emptiness.
Chica Umino
When a person dies, he disappears, along with his past, current lifestyle, and his future. Many people die in missions and wars. They die easily and in surprisingly simple ways. Hayate was one of them. Those who died had hopes and dreams, but everyone has something as important as those: parents, siblings, friends, lovers; people who are important to you, they trust and help each other. The bond between the people important to you ever since birth and the string that binds them becomes thicker and stronger as time goes by... It's beyond reason. Those bound to you by that string will do that because it is important.
Masashi Kishimoto
Why do people have to be this lonely? What's the point of it all? Millions of people in this world, all of them yearning, looking to others to satisfy them, yet isolating themselves. Why? Was the earth put here just to nourish human loneliness?
Haruki Murakami
For a great many people, the evening is the most enjoyable part of the day. Perhaps, then, there is something to his advice that I should cease looking back so much, that I should adopt a more positive outlook and try to make the best of what remains of my day. After all, what can we ever gain in forever looking back and blaming ourselves if our lives have not turned out quite as we might have wished?
Kazuo Ishiguro
He was beneath the waves, a creature crawling the ocean bottom.
Doppo Kunikida
I wonder where it all comes from--this need to go to the place where the body has been laid to rest. It's the need to reconfirm how precious someone was and how irreplaceable, and the desire to reconnect with them on a different plane.
Takashi Hiraide
She did not know it, but she was actually in despair at the poverty of human emotions. Was it not irrational that there was nothing to do except weep when ten people died, just as one wept for but a single person?
Yukio Mishima
Her only weapons were her tears.
Eiji Yoshikawa
When things get really bad, you take comfort in the placeness of a place.
Banana Yoshimoto
Every one of us is losing something precious to us. Lost opportunities, lost possibilities, feelings we can never get back again. That’s what part of it means to be alive. But inside our heads — at least that’s where I imagine it — there’s a little room where we store those memories. A room like the stacks in this library. And to understand the workings of our own heart we have to keep on making new reference cards. We have to dust things off every once in a while, let fresh air in, change the water in the flower vases. In other words, you’ll live for ever in your own private library.
Haruki Murakami
In other words, I was a moderately happy penguin who was occasionally attacked by sadness.
Takuji Ichikawa
The more one loves, the heavier the meaning of death becomes, and the deeper the sense of loss.
Otsuichi
I would never see her again, except in memory. She was here, and now she's gone. There is no middle ground. Probably is a word that you may find south of the border. But never, ever west of the sun.
Haruki Murakami
For darkness terrifies. It swallows you, warps you, nullifies you. Who alive can possibly profess confidence in darkness? In the dark, you can't see.
Haruki Murakami
We keep moving. And as we do, the things around us, well, they disappear.
Haruki Murakami
I want you to forget what i told you earlier, I... I couldn’t love someone like you. I hate you. I thought it the second i saw you in the park. You were just poison! Drinking beer in the morning, quoting some stupid Tanka to me! You listening to other people talking all day just so you never have to reveal a thing about yourself! You knew who I was, I was just a kid! What were you thinking what’s wrong with you?! If I’d know who you were I wouldn’t have told you a thing about me or my dreams. You don’t think I can do it! You don’t think I’ll ever amount to anything! What is that why you didn’t say anything to me? You thought maybe you'd humor the little kid? Indulge his fantasies for a little while! Just string him along? Just say it I’ll never measure up to my dreams! You knew from the beginning you could have just admitted it! But you played along. So tell me god damn it! Tell me that little kids should run along to school! Tell me that you hate me! Say it! Come on listener say something for a change! You loser! Its because you act like that. You never say what's important! You act like it's none of your business! You've been living your whole life alone!
Makoto Shinkai
Each memory was now the shadow of a shadow of a shadow. The only thing that remained tangible to him was the sense of absence.
Haruki Murakami
Things are just things. They can't bring back the dead. it just makes me feel better.
Banana Yoshimoto
Whenever you get something in this world, you lose something too — that's just the way things work.
Banana Yoshimoto
There were many tears, many unsure times, many troubled moments. The fun memories were only a few, but even so, those memories will shine bright like stardust, and continue to shine on in my heart.
Mika Yamamori
I've decided. The next time I cry, it'll be for "someone special", and it'll definitely be "tears of happiness.
Mika Yamamori
This is probably going to be one wound that can never be healed.
Mika Yamamori
I'm going to move on, while carrying these feelings with me.
Mika Yamamori