Quotes by Japanese Authors - Page 4

There's no short-cut to becoming strong. Even if you try to look strong on the outside, that thin layer will soon fall off.
Hideaki Sorachi
People seem weak, but they're strong. They seem strong, but they're weak.
Fuyumi Soryo
I didn't realize it until now, but I don't really know anything about them, or what kind of people they are, really. You can't see inside a person's heart.
Koushun Takami
It will be interesting to find out something about her that no one else knew.
Hinako Ashihara
Every person has their own colour.
Haruki Murakami
Just 'cuz a kid is crying doesn't mean it's a conversation worth crying over.
Tite Kubo
One guy yelled at me, 'You stupid bitch, how do you live like that with nothing in your brain?' Well, that did it. I wasn't going to put up with that. Ok, I'm not so smart. I'm working class. But it's the working class that keeps the world running, and it's the working classes that get exploited. What kind of revolution is it that just throws out big words that working-class people can't understand? What kind of crap social revolution is that? I mean, I'd like to make the world a better place, too. If somebody's really being exploited, we've got to put a stop to it. That's what I believe, and that's why I ask questions. Am I right, or what?
Haruki Murakami
I wonder why the normies get so touchy-feely.
Wataru Watari
She's not tsundere. She's just an unpleasant woman.
Wataru Watari
The gods lie. They lie because it's the best they can do. We reach out for their lies and we keep on living.
Kaori Ozaki
That amazing time in our lives is gone, and will never return. All the beautiful possibilities we had then have been swallowed up in the flow of time.
Haruki Murakami
It might be just some trend that came and went,' I said. 'But for us, it's our life.
Kazuo Ishiguro
If all you do it "live with it"...then that's not much of a life.
Ichigo Takano
I've always loved fixing broken things.If something fixed by myself caused a smile, I'd feel saved. In that case it would be worth it. And I was delighted.
Hiro Kiyohara
Well, the death of the body is the flight of the arrow. It's makin' a straight line for the brain. No dodgin' it not for anyone. People have't die, the body has't fall. Time is hurlin' that arrow forward. And yet, like I was sayin' thought goes on subdividin' that time for ever and ever. The paradox becomes real. The arrow never hits.In other words, immortality.
Haruki Murakami
Immortals must always give humans one thing! Either fear and terror! Or beauty!!
Ken Akamatsu
Every life is precious. Please treasure each and every day, the present, the moment, and yourself.
Ichigo Takano
Compromise is low class. I don't have anything against the poor, but being low class is the root of all evil
Novala Takemoto
In town, there's a tiny beach that's never busy, not even in the summer.I used to like walking there, looking for stuff.Like old fireworks.Or kelp.A hat knocked off someone's head by the wind. You basically never find what you were expecting to.And maybe you weren't expecting to find anything right from the start...
Inio Asano
In short, I ran away. I was about to fall in love. Aside from being opposed to getting involved with a guy, I'm a dried-up old man, just like he said. He's too dazzling to be with me. He's beyond me.
Kou Yoneda
To fall in love and to commit yourself to love means you should make your loved one the one thing you cherish the most.
Kou Yoneda
When you fall in love, the natural thing to do is give yourself to it. That's what I think. It's just a form of sincerity.
Haruki Murakami
In the spring of her twenty-second year, Sumire fell in love for the first time in her life. An intense love, a veritable tornado sweeping across the plains—flattening everything in its path, tossing things up in the air, ripping them to shreds, crushing them to bits. The tornado’s intensity doesn’t abate for a second as it blasts across the ocean, laying waste to Angkor Wat, incinerating an Indian jungle, tigers and everything, transforming itself into a Persian desert sandstorm, burying an exotic fortress city under a sea of sand. In short, a love of truly monumental proportions. The person she fell in love with happened to be 17 years older than Sumire. And was married. And, I should add, was a woman. This is where it all began, and where it all ended. Almost.
Haruki Murakami
I always felt as if I'd been handed a cardboard box crammed full of monkeys. I'd take the monkeys out of the box one at a time, carefully brush off the dust, give them a pat on the bottom, and send them scurrying off into the fields. I never knew where they went from there.
Haruki Murakami
His practice was to listen noncommittally with half his mind, while he allowed the other half to lose itself in utterly unrelated , often deeply lonely musings. From the speaker's perspective it was like sticking a lance into something again and again with no result...
Yasushi Inoue
I can't afford to say yes to all my staff's desires, but one thing is certain – I can't afford the outrageous cost of not listening to their requests.
John Yokoyama
When someone tells you something big, it's like you're taking money from them, and there's no way it will ever go back to being the way it was. You have to take responsibility for listening.
Banana Yoshimoto
When we fear what other people think about us, we are frequently more focused on 'being interesting' and less focused on 'taking an interest.' That's why many people talk a great deal when they are anxious and why many people never feel heard. If both people and conversation are trying to be interesting, there is no one left to genuinely listen.
John Yokoyama
What I really wanted... wasn't fame. All I wanted was to know... whether or not I should've been born. Huff... I can't even shout anymore. Luffy, listen to my next words carefully. Tell everybody what I say to you. Pops!! Fellow pirates!! And... Luffy... I've always been such a hopeless person... huff huff... I was demon spawn... the son of the devil!! Thank you... for loving me!!
Portugas D. Ace
I know exactly what I'm doing, but I just can't stop. That's my greatest weakness.
Haruki Murakami
[Rinda] often worried how she might make the coward she saw [in Remus] into a brave warrior, and someday, a king -- a task which she felt was her responsibility. Rinda had not yet realized that sometimes courage is the same thing as folly and that sometimes a skepticism bordering on her blindness to her brother's strengths was a result of her own sensitivity.
Kaoru Kurimoto
Every weakness contains within itself a strength.
Shūsaku Endō
In order to pile weakness upon weakness he was trying to drag others along the path that he himself had walked.
Shūsaku Endō
Kyoya: A single day can make all the difference.
Bisco Hatori
Are you asking because you really want an answer?
Haruki Murakami
I don't like that guy. He calls the cops for everything.
Jōji Tsubota
Anyone who sang the praises of undying love in this day and age belonged to the first rank of hypocrites in Daisuke's estimate.
Sōseki Natsume
I had several girlfriends, but nothing lasted. I’d date one for a few months, and then start thinking: This isn’t what I want.
Haruki Murakami
I didn't know the real reason that she was crying. I was just carried away by the feeling of her in my arms, trembling and warm.
Kaori Ozaki
The world looks different through a smiling face and a crying face, you know? That is, if you have the power to smile through difficult times, then you have nothing to fear. Even hell becomes heaven for you.
Hideaki Sorachi
The guys who play it [soccer] are kinda dumb. Why don't they just kick the crap out of the guy in front of the net? Then they could score all they want.
Tite Kubo
As I run I tell myself to think of a river. And clouds. But essentially I'm not thinking of a thing. All I do is keep on running in my own cozy, homemade void, my own nostalgic silence. And this is a pretty wonderful thing. No matter what anybody else says.
Haruki Murakami
To take responsibility is to take the pain onto yourself. It means to bear more pain than what others felt because of your mistake. -Tokuchi Toua
Kaitani Shinobu
A low possibility means it's not zero. - Tokuchi Toua
Kaitani Shinobu
History's shown that in this world, when you take your ideals too far, all you ever create is Hell.
Ken Akamatsu
If you think equality will stop the fighting, you're deluding yourself! If everyone receives the same compensation, they will stop working for it, which will lead to the weakening of our nation! The only result will be conflict born from poverty!
Adachitoka
Now If diversity were inherently good, inherently valuable, inherently wonderful, why would we have to have the highly-paid profession know as 'diversity consultant' to manage it? Things that are inherently good, to enjoy them, or to make the most of them, you don't need a consultant. You don't need a consultant to make the most out of good-tasting food, beautiful weather, the affection of your friends. Those are inherently good things. Diversity required consultants because diversity is hard. Diversity is difficult. It's because it's difficult for people to try to work, to act, and live together with people are are unlike themselves.
Jared Taylor
...All without any more sound than flipping over a playing card. And sitting in this limo, compared to my fifteen-year-old Volkswagen Beetle I'd bought off a friend, was as quiet as sitting at the bottom of a lake wearing earplugs.
Haruki Murakami
The whole universe is like some big FedEx box.
Haruki Murakami
But metaphors help eliminate what separates you and me.
Haruki Murakami
It made me sad when I caught myself pretending that everybody out there in cyberspace cared about what I thought, when really nobody gives a shit. And when I multiplied that sad feeling by all the millions of people in their lonely little rooms, furiously writing and posting to their lonely little pages that nobody has time to read because they’re all so busy writing and posting, it kind of broke my heart.
Ruth Ozeki
I . . . hurried to the city library to find out the true age of Chicago. City library! After all, it cannot be anything but Chicagoesque. His is the richest library, no doubt, as everything in Chicago is great in size and wealth. Its million books are filling all the shelves, as the dry goods fill the big stores. Oh, librarian, you furnished me a very good dinner, even ice cream, but—where is the table? The Chicago city library has no solemnly quiet, softly peaceful reading-room; you are like a god who made a perfect man and forgot to put in the soul; the books are worth nothing without having a sweet corner and plenty of time, as the man is nothing without soul. Throw those books away, if you don't have a perfect reading-room! Dinner is useless without a table. I want to read a book as a scholar, as I want to eat dinner as a gentleman. What difference is there, my dearest Chicago, between your honourable library and the great department store, an emporium where people buy things without a moment of selection, like a busy honey bee?The library is situated in the most annoyingly noisy business quarter, under the overhanging smoke, in the nearest reach of the engine bells of the lakeside. One can hardly spend an hour in it if he be not a Chicagoan who was born without taste of the fresh air and blue sky. The heavy, oppressive, ill-smelling air of Chicago almost kills me sometimes. What a foolishness and absurdity of the city administrators to build the office of learning in such place of restaurants and barber shops!Look at that edifice of the city library! Look at that white marble! That's great, admirable; that means tremendous power of money. But what a vulgarity, stupid taste, outward display, what an entire lacking of fine sentiment and artistic love! Ah, those decorations with gold and green on the marble stone spoil the beauty! What a shame! That is exactly Chicagoesque. O Chicago, you have fine taste, haven't you?
Yone Noguchi
I mean, public libraries like this one were always short of money, so building even the tiniest of labyrinths had to be beyond their means.
Haruki Murakami
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
A gust of wind set the leaves of grass to dancing and celebrated the grass's song before it died.
Haruki Murakami
That's gotta be one of the principles behind reality. Accepting things that are hard to comprehend, and leaving them that way.
Haruki Murakami
There are symbolic dreams-dreams that symbolize some reality. Then there are symbolic realities-realities that symbolize a dream
Haruki Murakami
Information is a lot like water; it's hard to hold on to, and hard to keep from leaking away.
Ruth Ozeki
Beneath the instinct to fight there lurks a diviner instinct to love.
Inazo Nitobe
There is an instinctive withdrawal for the sake of preservation, a closure that assumes the order of completion. Winter is a season unto itself.
Haruki Murakami