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Quotes by Japanese Authors
"I was dying to have a cat. But they wouldn't let me. My mother hated them. Not once in my life have I managed to get something I really wanted. Not once. Can you believe it? You can't understand what it's like to live like that. When you get used to that kind of life--of never having anything you want--then you stop knowing what it is you want."
"Americans are somehow obsessed with her, and something about me hit a spot with people in Japan."
"Despite Japan's desires and efforts, unfortunate differences in the ways that Japan, England, the United States, and China understood circumstances, together with misunderstandings of attitudes, made it impossible for the parties to agree."
"It's a fairly recent thing but I've become very fond of making drinks myself."
"Some things in life are too complicated to explain in any language."
"The speed of change makes you wonder what will become of architecture."
"Even when I work with computers, with high technology, I always try to put in the touch of the hand."
"Besides being the world the kind of sadness that can not be expressed in tears. You can not explain it to anyone. Unable to take any shape, settles quietly in the bottom of the heart as snow during the windless night."
"Nobody likes being alone that much. I don't go out of my way to make friends, that's all. It just leads to disappointment."
"My friends and I took songwriting very, very seriously. My hero was and still is Bob Dylan, but also people like Leonard Cohen and Joni Mitchell and that whole generation."
"I go back to the reading room, where I sink down in the sofa and into the world of The Arabian Nights. Slowly, like a movie fadeout, the real world evaporates. I'm alone, inside the world of the story. My favourite feeling in the world."
"The biggest lesson I've learned by living abroad for the last four years is the importance of communication."
"I never read reviews. I'm not interested. But I value a lot the reactions of the spectators."
"If you give people nothingness, they can ponder what can be achieved from that nothingness."
"For me, running is both exercise and a metaphor. Running day after day, piling up the races, bit by bit I raise the bar, and by clearing each level I elevate myself. At least that's why I've put in the effort day after day: to raise my own level. I'm no great runner, by any means. I'm at an ordinary " or perhaps more like mediocre " level. But that's not the point. The point is whether or not I improved over yesterday. In long-distance running the only opponent you have to beat is yourself, the way you used to be."
"Anyway, I forgot all about him once I graduated. So quickly and easily, it was weird. What was it about him that had made the seventeen-year-old me fall so hard? Try as I might, I couldn't remember. Life is strange, isn't it? You can be totally entranced by something one minute, be willing to sacrifice everything to make it yours, but then a little time passes, or your perspective changes a bit, and all of a sudden you're shocked at how its glow has faded. What was I looking at? you wonder. So that's the story of my 'breaking-and-entering' period."
"Of course we've been fighting against stereotypes from Day One at East West. That's the reason we formed: to combat that, and to show we are capable of more than just fulfilling the stereotypes - waiter, laundryman, gardener, martial artist, villain."
"People sometimes sneer at those who run every day, claiming they'll go to any length to live longer. But don't think that's the reason most people run. Most runners run not because they want to live longer, but because they want to live life to the fullest. If you're going to while away the years, it's far better to live them with clear goals and fully alive then in a fog, and I believe running helps you to do that. Exerting yourself to the fullest within your individual limits: that's the essence of running, and a metaphor for life - and for me, for writing as whole. I believe many runners would agree."
"I feel however, that we architects have a special duty and mission... (to contribute) to the socio-cultural development of architecture and urban planning."
"I think that ballads are always something where I can really become one with the audiance."
"I know, too, why she asked me not to forget her. Naoko herself knew, of course. She knew that my memories of her would fade. Which is precisely why she begged me never to forget her, to remember that she had existed. The thought fills me with an almost unbearable sorrow. Because Naoko never loved me."
"The Western poet and writer of romance has exactly the same kind of difficulty in comprehending Eastern subjects as you have in comprehending Western subjects."
"In traveling, a companion, in life, compassion,'" she repeats, making sure of it. If she had paper and pencil, it wouldn't surprise me if she wrote it down. "So what does that really mean? In simple terms." I think it over. It takes me a while to gather my thoughts, but she waits patiently. "I think it means," I say, "that chance encounters are what keep us going. In simple terms."
"In ancient times, people weren't just male or female, but one of three types: male/male, male/female, female/female. In other words, each person was made out of the components of two people. Everyone was happy with this arrangement and never really gave it much a thought. But then God took a knife and cut everybody in half, right down the middle. So after that the world was divided just into male and female, the upshot being that people spend their time running around trying to locate their missing other half."
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