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Quotes by Japanese Authors
"Every invention began as an imagination."
"A rubber plant is just about the ideal family."
"I didn't have the vaguest idea of what to do " I couldn't keep staring at the wall forever, I told myself. But even that admonition didn't work. A faculty advisor reviewing a graduation thesis would have had the perfect comment: you write well, you argue clearly, but you don't have anything to say."
"There are symbolic dreams-dreams that symbolize some reality. Then there are symbolic realities-realities that symbolize a dream."
"There are three ways you can get along with a girl: one, shut up and listen to what she has to say; two, tell her you like what she's wearing; and three, treat her to really good food...If you do all that and still don't get the results you want, better give up."
"The utility of adversity is to draw inspiration, wisdom and strength from it."
"One other thing I learned from working in a company was that the majority of people in the world have no problem following orders. They're actually happy to be told what to do. They might complain, but that's not how they really feel. They just grumble out of habit. If you told them to think for themselves, and make their own decisions and take responsibility for them, they'd be clueless."
"I don't dream. Come to think of it, i haven't had any dreams in a long time."
"That's gotta be one of the principles behind reality. Accepting things that are hard to comprehend, and leaving them that way."
"It was as if my whole life revolved around trying to judge the appropriate point in a conversation to say goodbye."
"You want to know why you felt that way about me even though you didn't love me."
"Talent can be a nice thing to have sometimes. You look good, attract attention, and if you're lucky, you make some money. Women flock to you. In that sense, having talent's preferable to having none. But talent only functions when it's supported by a tough, unyielding physical and mental focus. All it takes is one screw in your brain to come loose and fall off, or some connection in your body to break down, and your concentration vanishes, like the dew at dawn. If talent's the foundation you rely on, and yet it's so unreliable that you have no idea what's going to happen to it the next minute, what meaning does it have?"
"I wrote letters in the classroom, I wrote letters at my desk at home with Seagull in my lap, I wrote letters at empty tables during my breaks at the Italian restaurant. It was as if I were writing letters to hold together the pieces of my crumbling life."
"You mean machines are like humans?"I shook my head. "No, not like humans. With machines the feeling is, well, more finite. It doesn't go any further. With humans it's different. The feeling is always changing. Like if you love somebody, the love is always shifting or wavering. It's always questioning or inflating or disappearing or denying or hurting. And the thing is, you can't do anything about it, you can't control it. With my Subaru, it's not so complicated."
"I thought about Kizuki. "So you finally made Naoko yours," I heard myself telling him. Oh, well, she was yours to begin with. Now maybe, she's where she belongs. But in this world, in this imperfect world of the living, I did the best I could for Naoko."
"It just happens to be the way that I'm made. I have to write things down to feel I fully comprehend them."
"The key to finding financial freedom is to unlock your entrepreneurial intelligence, work your network and lead the time."
"All I wanted was to go off to some other world, a place beyond anybody's reach. A place beyond the flow of time."
"Don't forget - you're the one who swam across the freezing sea at night."
"Aku akan bahagia jika aku dan lari bisa menua bersama."
"People can easily forget how fast you did your work, but can hardly forget how well you did it."
"I believe the anthropogenic effect for climate change is still only one of the hypotheses to explain the variability of climate."
"It's unfair."As a rule, life is unfair," I said.Yeah, but I think I did say some awful things."To Dick?"Yeah."I pulled the car over to the shoulder of the road and turned off the ignition. "That's just stupid, that kind of thinking," I said, nailing her with my eyes. "Instead of regretting what you did, you could have treated him decently from the beginning. You could've tried to be fair. But you didn't. You don't even have the right to be sorry."
"Belief in oneself is an essential factor for success in life. It helpsyou surmount challenges on your road to success."
"Sorel's basic character flaws had all cemented by the age of fifteen, a fact which further elicited my sympathy. To have all the building blocks of your life in place by that age was, by any standard, a tragedy. It was as good as sealing yourself into a dungeon. Walled in, with nowhere to go but your own doom. Walls. A world completely surrounded by walls."
"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."
"For a ten-year-old boy and a ten-year-old girl to become good friends was not easy under any circumstances. Indeed, it might be one of the most difficult accomplishments in the world."
"I'd like to have a good long talk with you once you've calmed down. Please call me soon. Happy Birthday."
"Opera lovers may be the narrowest people in the world."
"Life's no piece of cake, mind you, but the recipe's my own to fool with."
"The feeling of the wind, the sound of rushing water, the sense of sunlight breaking through the clouds, the colors of flowers as the seasons changed - everything around him felt changed, as if they had all been recast."
"Your life is a screenplay, you must be the author; direct and make it a success."
"But metaphors help eliminate what separates you and me."
"A question wells up inside me, a question so big it blocks my throat and makes it hard to breathe. Somehow I swallow it back, finally choosing another. "Are memories such an important thing?""It depends," she replies, and closes her eyes. "In some cases, they're the most important thing there is."
"Unable to sleep after the others had drowsed off, I crawled out of the tent and lay on the ground, looking at the sky. Now and then, a shooting star would trace a bright arc across the heavens. The longer I watched, though, the more nervous it made me. There were simply too many stars, and the sky was too vast and deep. A huge, overpowering foreign object, it surrounded me, enveloped me, and made me feel almost dizzy. Until that moment, I had always thought that the earth on which I stood was a solid object that would last forever. Or rather, I had never thought about such a thing at all. I had simply taken it for granted."
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