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"My observation is that after one hundred and twenty years of modernisation since the opening of the country, present-day Japan is split between two opposite poles of ambiguity."
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"The answers to your problems lie all around you. The keys to your self-discovery are waiting to be found in each sunset, each pair of eyes, each breath of fresh air. Listen to the symphony of life and you will hear yourself. Find the beauty of nature and you have found your soul."

"People just weren't interesting. Maybe they weren't supposed to be. But animals, birds, even insects were. I couldn't understand it."

"It's strange to see people you don't know well in the morning, with sleepy eyes and pillow creases in their cheeks."

"I give her my best smile. Before the alien Armageddon happened, I was known for my smile. Not bragging too much, but I had to be careful never to smile while I drove. It had the capacity to blind oncoming traffic. But it has absolutely no effect on Ringer. She doesn't squint in its overwhelming luminescence. She doesn't even blink."

"The whole of the world could be deduced from the smallest grain of sand, if one studied it closely enough."

"Most people spend less time outside than prisoners."

"The Republic's most wanted criminal is just a boy, sitting before me, suddenly vulnerable, laying all his weaknesses out for me to see."

"I believe in spectacles, but I think eyes necessary too."

"Snap your fingerstop the world - rain falls harder."

"His eyes said what I cannot see."
Explore more quotes by Kenzaburo Oe

"However, please allow me to say that the fundamental style of my writing has been to start from my personal matters and then to link it up with society, the state and the world."

"Even though we now have the half-century-old new Constitution, there is a popular sentiment of support for the old one that lives on in reality in some quarters."

"By reading Huckleberry Finn I felt I was able to justify my act of going into the mountain forest at night and sleeping among the trees with a sense of security which I could never find indoors."

"Paradoxically, the people and state of Japan living on such moral props were not innocent but had been stained by their own past history of invading other Asian countries."

"From another point of view, a new situation now seems to be arising in which Japan's prosperity is going to be incorporated into the expanding potential power of both production and consumption in Asia at large."

"The ambiguous orientation of Japan drove the country into the position of an invader in Asia."

"The Japanese chose the principle of eternal peace as the basis of morality for our rebirth after the War."

"After the end of the Second World War it was a categorical imperative for us to declare that we renounced war forever in a central article of the new Constitution."
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