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Quotes by Japanese Authors
"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 class that get exploited. What kind revolution is it that just throws out big words that working class people can't understand.Revolution or not the working class will just keep on scraping a living in the same old shitholesI'm not going to believe in any damned revolution. Love is all I'm going to believe in. -- Midori."
"Youths are our arrows to the future."
"When you're having what you feel like is a 'bad day' and then someone comes along out of nowhere and extends to you the simplest of kind gestures, you feel it so deeply within your heart."
"The difference between a conventional counsellor and an empowerment counsellor is that a conventional therapist will allow you to dwell in your pit of misery for months, years and possibly even decades; whereas an empowerment counsellor will challenge you to recognise that your past pains and seemingly negative experiences are the very key to accessing your greatest self."
"The conclusion of things is the good. The good is, in other words, the conclusion at which all things arrive. Let's leave doubt for tomorrow," Komatsu said. "That is the point."
"Hundreds of butterflies flitted in and out of sight like short-lived punctuation marks in a stream of consciousness without beginning or end."
"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."
"That's my dream. It's always the same. Always. Every little detail. And every time I have it, it's just as scary as the last. It's so real, I feel as if I've already died hundreds of times."
"Dear Girls Across the Globe,Let's stop body-shaming each other with hurtful comments about how another girl looks or doesn't look. We are all beautiful in our own unique way; so let's speak about each other with the dignity that we would want others to have when they speak about us."
"He was a far more voracious reader than me, but he made it a rule never to touch a book by any author who had not been dead at least 30 years. "That's the only kind of book I can trust," he said."It's not that I don't believe in contemporary literature," he added, "but I don't want to waste valuable time reading any book that has not had the baptism of time. Life is too short."
"If you are not innovating, you are deteriorating."
"The little things are important, Mr. Wind-Up Bird."
"Stop existing and start living!"
"I know how fiction matters to me, because if I want to express myself, I have to make up a story. Some people call it imagination. To me, it's not imagination. It's just a way of watching."
"To every guy who tries to say that we have already achieved equality for the sexes, if this were true, you wouldn't be told to 'man up', 'be a man', 'stop being a p*#%y', 'harden the fuck up', 'toughen up', 'boys don't cry', 'don't be such a girl', 'stop being a wimp'. As long as this type of language still exists in our society, then gender equality, my friends, has in fact not been achieved after all."
"Every once in a while she'll get worked up and cry like that. But that's ok. She's letting her feelings out. The scary thing is not being able to do that. Then your feelings build up and harden and die inside. That's when you're in big trouble."
"A short story I have written long ago would barge into my house in the middle of the night, shake me awake and shout, 'Hey,this is no time for sleeping! You can't forget me, there's still more to write!' Impelled by that voice, I would find myself writing a novel. In this sense, too, my short stories and novels connect inside me in a very natural, organic way."
"A Godless life is a goalless life."
"Don't judge yourself by your past, you no longer live there."
"She was seriously in love, but she never made demands."
"For me- and for everybody else, probably- this is my first experience growing old, and the emotions I'm having, too, are all first-time feelings. If it were something I'd experienced before, then I'd be able to understand it more clearly, but this is the first time, so I can't. For now all I can do is put off making any detailed judgments and accept things as they are. Just like I accept the sky, the clouds, and the river. And there's also something kind of comical about it all, something you don't want to discard completely."
"It's just a feeling I have. What you see with your eyes is not necessarily real. My enemy is, among other things, the me inside me."
"(When asked "Was the model for Midori (a character in Norwegian Wood) modeled after your wife?) I showed your message to my wife. She got mad and yelled: "What would make them think I was the model for Midori?! She told me to fix the misunderstanding immediately, so that's why I'm writing this reply now. Please stop causing problems in my household. Thank you."
"Our experiences always teach us something. If the experience is 'bad', then the lesson is even more powerful and meaningful. Every unfortunate incident makes us stronger and better equipped to handle new challenges."
"They had stolen my memories from me! Nobody had that right. Nobody! My memories belonged to me. Stealing memories was stealing time. I got so mad, I lost all fear. I didn't care what happened. I want to live! I told myself. I will live. I will get out of this insane netherworld and get back my stolen memories back and live. Forget the end of the world, I was ready to reclaim my whole self."
"I have a million things to talk to you about. A million things we have to talk about. All I want in this world is you. I want to see you and talk. I want the two of us to begin everything from the beginning."
"I never had what it takes to make a first-rate anything.''That's wrong,' she declared. 'Everyone must have one thing that they can excel at. It's just a matter of drawing it out, isn't it?' But school doesn't know how to draw it out. It crushes the gift. It's no wonder most people never get to be what they want to be. They just get ground down."
"Your believability influences your accessibility to possibilty."
"There was just one moon. That familiar, yellow, solitary moon. The same moon that silently floated over fields of pampas grass, the moon that rose--a gleaming, round saucer--over the calm surface of lakes, that tranquilly beamed down on the rooftops of fast-asleep houses. The same moon that brought the high tide to shore, that softly shone on the fur of animals and enveloped and protected travelers at night. The moon that, as a crescent, shaved slivers from the soul--or, as a new moon, silently bathed the earth in its own loneliness. THAT moon."
"It was as if-this is something I thought of only later, of course-she was gently peeling bcd one layer after another hat covered a person's heart, a very sensual feeling."
"The easiest way to have a peek behind the curtain is to learn from those that are ahead of you."
"Wasn't much of a life anyway. Wasn't much of a brain.""But didn't you say you were satisfied with your life?""Word games," I dismissed. "Every army needs a flag."
"Not being able to find the right words at crucial times is one of my many problems."
"April ended and May came along, but May was even worse than April. In the deepening spring of May, I had not choice but to recognize the trembling of my heart. It usually happened as the sun was going down. In the pale evening gloom, when the soft fragrance of magnolias hung in air, my heart would swell without warning, and tremble, and and lurch with a stab of pain. I would try clamping my eyes shut and gritting my teeth, and wait for it to pass. And it would pass - but slowly, taking its own time, and leaving a dull ache behind."
"Expression is a function of intention and intention emanates from your thought faculty."
"Time weighs down on you like an old, ambiguous dream. You keep on moving, trying to sleep through it. But even if you go to the ends of the earth, you won't be able to escape it. Still, you have to go there- to the edge of the world. There's something you can't do unless you get there."
"Psychologically speaking (I'll only wheel out the amateur psychology just this once, so bear with me), encounters that call up strong physical disgust or revulsion are often in fact projections of our own faults and weaknesses."
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