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Quotes by Japanese Authors
"They say it's a dangerous experiment to include dreams (actual dreams or otherwise) in the fiction you write. Only a handful of writers - and I'm talking the most talented - are able to pull off the irrational synthesis you find in dreams."
"My words did not seem to reach her. Or, if they did, she was unable to grasp their meaning."
"In the novelist's profession, as far as I'm concerned, there's no such thing as winning or losing. Maybe numbers of copies sold, awards won, and critics' praise serve as outward standards for accomplishment in literature, but none of them really matter. What's crucial is whether your writing attains the standards you've set for yourself. Failure to reach that bar is not something you can easily explain away. When it comes to other people, you can always come up with a reasonable explanation, but you can't fool yourself. In this sense, writing novels and running full marathons are very much alike."
"Their hearts, lost in thought, slowly tick away time. When we pass each other on the road, we listen to the rhythm of each other's breathing, and sense the way the other person is ticking away the moments."
"Your purpose has the capacity to employ and enrich you for a lifetime."
"Thought leadership is first and foremost life leadership."
"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."
"It's only when you learn, live and give sincere service that you can experience life's deepest fulfillment and true joy."
"What alternative is there to the media's "Us versus "Them? The danger is that if it is used to prop up this "righteous position of "ours all we will see from now on are ever more exacting and minute analyses of the "dirty distortions in "their thinking. Without some flexibility in our definitions we'll remain forever stuck with the same old knee-jerk reactions, or worse, slide into complete apathy."
"We're on the border of this world, speaking a common language. That's all."
"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."
"Until you go and grow MADÍ with and in your true passion and purpose, you cannot enter the realm of meteority which is enemical to mediocrity."
"Money had no name, of course. And if it did have a name, it would no longer be money. What gave money its true meaning was its dark-night namelessness, its breathtaking interchangeability."
"Maybe so, but I'm not just looking up at the sky and waiting for the fruit to drop. In my own way, I'm working hard. I'm working ten times harder than you are."
"Leadership is the ability to make things happen."
"Tisn't any need for you't'know. Even without you knowin', you function as yourself. That's your black box. In other words, we all carry around this great unexplored 'elephant graveyard' inside us. Outer space aside, this is truly humanity's last terra incognita."
"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."
"Waiting for your answer is one of the most painful things I have ever been through. At least let me know whether or not I hurt you."
"We're on the same wavelength. We're connected that way, even if I'm away from her."
"Being tough isn't in and of itself a bad thing. Looking back on it, though, I can see I was too used to being strong, and never tried to understand those who were weak. I was too used to being fortunate, and didn't try to understand those less fortunate. Too used to being healthy, and didn't try to understand the pain of those who weren't. Whenever I saw a person in trouble, somebody paralyzed by events, I decided it was entirely his fault""he just wasn't trying hard enough. People who complained were just plain lazy. My outlook on life was unshakable, and practical, but lacked any human warmth. And not a single person around me pointed this out.' - Miu."
"It's really difficult to talk about dead people, but it's even harder to talk about dead young women. It's because from the time they die, they'll be young forever. On the other hand, for us, the survivors, every year, every month, every day, we get older.Sometimes, I feel like I can feel myself aging from one hour to the next. It's a terrible thing, but that's reality."
"In other words, Shozaburo Takitani was now alone in the world. This was no great shock to him, however, nor did it make him feel particularly sad or miserable. He did, of course, experience some sense of absence, but he felt that, eventually, life had to turn out more or less like this. Everyone ended up alone sooner or later."
"You are 27 or 28 right? It is very tough to live at that age. When nothing is sure. I have sympathy with you."
"An apparently trivial indulgence in lust or anger today is the loss of a ridge or railway line or bridgehead from which the enemy may launch an attack otherwise impossible."
"Reality is created out of confusion and contradiction, and if you exclude those elements, you're no longer talking about reality. You might think that --by following language and a logic that appears consistent-- you're able to exclude that aspect of reality, but it will always be lying in wait for you, ready to take its revenge."
"I'd swallow some whiskey and listen to the waves while I thought about Naoko. It was too strange to think that she was dead and no longer part of this world. I couldn't absorb the truth of it. I couldn't believe it. I had heard the nails being driven into the lid of her coffin, but I still couldn't adjust to the fact that she had returned to nothingness."
"Our hearts are not stones. A stone may disintegrate in time and lose its outward form. But hearts never disintegrate. They have no outward form, and whether good or evil, we can always communicate them to one another."
"For some reason all the middle-aged women he knew were very efficient."
"We all carry success gene within us, but its manifestation is our responsibility."
"How can I put this? There's a king of gap between what I think is real and what's really real. I get this feeling like some kind of little something-or-other is there, somewhere inside me... like a burglar is in the house, hiding in a wardrobe... and it comes out every once in a while and messes up whatever order or logic I've established for myself. The way a magnet can make a machine go crazy."
"Before and after you do your best, know it that you must rely on God. Your best - no matter how great - is nothing if you minus God from the equation."
"I was living for one thing only, and that was to confirm my own lack of feeling."
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