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Quotes by Japanese Authors
"You know, Junpei, everything in the world has its reasons for doing what it does."
"I've had sex with lots of guys, but I think I did it mostly out of fear. I was scared not to have somebody putting his arms around me, so I could never say no. That's all. Nothing good ever came of sex like that. All it does is grind down the meaning of life a piece at a time."
"I enjoyed the opportunities, but there was no time to think."
"To me, the appeal of opera lies in the fact that a myriad of singers and instruments, each possessed of different qualities of voice and sound, against the backdrop of a grand stage and beautiful costumes, come together in one complete and impressive drama."
"The rain that fell on the city runs down the dark gutters and empties into the sea without even soaking the ground."
"This simple idea served to provide information on the geometrical shape of reacting molecules, and I was able to make the role of the frontier orbitals in chemical reactions more distinct through visualization, by drawing their diagrams."
"What I am or am not wearing does not correlate with my competency as a professional, a mother, or a feminist role model. My clothes don't define me and neither does my nakedness. I define me."
"And you really will have to make it through that violent, metaphysical, symbolic storm. No matter how metaphysical or symbolic it might be, make no mistake about it: it will cut through flesh like a thousand razor blades. People will bleed there, and you will bleed too. Hot, red blood. You'll catch that blood in your hands, your own blood and the blood of others. And once the storm is over you won't remember how you made it through, how you managed to survive. You won't even be sure, in fact, whether the storm is really over. But one thing is certain. When you come out of the storm you won't be the same person who walked in. That's what this storm's all about."
"Unfortunately, the clock is ticking, the hours are going by. The past increases, the future recedes. Possibilities decreasing, regrets mounting."
"It is true that short forms of poetry have been cultivated in the Far East more than in modern Europe; but in all European literature short forms of poetry are to be found - indeed quite as short as anything in Japanese."
"The whole terrible fight occured in the area of imagination. That is the precise location of our battlefield. It is there, that we experience our victories and defeats."
"We think that it is the best scientists working in the frontier fields of science who are best able to judge what is good and what is bad - if any - in the application of their scientific research."
"Art exists for the human species. I think that all of the people who love art, those who teach art, and all of you should burn with the obligation to save the world."
"I began in an era where four-letter words were not allowed."
"Erotic role-play is a powerful sexual outlet which can orgasmically release us from the shackles of convention and normality to express a side of ourselves we otherwise would not have opportunity to convey."
"Artists are those who can evade the verbose."
"Most of the work performed by a development engineer results in failure."
"Samsa certainly had no idea what lay ahead. He was in the dark about everything: the future, of course, but the present and the past as well . What was right, and what was wrong? Just learning how to dress was a riddle."
"The direct investment of Japanese businesses to East Asian economies accelerates the reallocation of their production bases. Consequently, between Japan and the other East Asian countries, both exports and imports are growing substantially."
"I think that my job is to observe people and the world, and not to judge them. I always hope to position myself away from so-called conclusions. I would like to leave everything wide open to all the possibilities in the world."
"Almost a century has passed since Japan first entered the world community by concluding a treaty of amity with the United States of America in 1854."
"A samurai should always be prepared for death - whether his own or someone else's."
"Designs of purely arbitrary nature cannot be expected to last long."
"I all of a sudden got to feeling like talking to people. Whenever I look at the ocean, I always want to talk to people, but when I'm talking to people, I always want to look at the ocean. I'm weird like that."
"But the history of the changes produced by a universal idea is not a history of changes in the individual, but of changes brought about by the successive efforts of millions of individuals in the course of many generations."
"The second is that the role of China trade in Japanese economy, important as it is, has often been exaggerated, as proven by our experience of the past 6 years."
"Technological considerations are of great importance to architecture and cities in the informational society."
"Obviously, the difference between a game and actual training is you're using your whole body, so in that sense, maybe not, although maybe something to do with reaction, the speed of reaction, maybe that was of use during the training."
"I was feeling lonely without her, but the fact that I could feel lonely at all was consolation. Loneliness wasn't such a bad feeling. It was like the stillness of the pin oak after the little birds had flown off."
"Life is growth. If we stop growing, technically and spiritually, we are as good as dead."
"Perhaps there is an idea among Japanese students that one general difference between Japanese and Western poetry is that the former cultivates short forms and the latter longer ones, gut this is only in part true."
"I can't do a film after having debated it. I am unable to do a film while discussing it with my team. I issue directives. I do not achieve it otherwise."
"You cannot function in an unction you don't take action on."
"The sense of tragedy - according to Aristotle - comes, ironically enough, not from the protagonist's weak points but from his good qualities. Do you know what I'm getting at? People are drawn deeper into tragedy not by their defects but by their virtues....[But] we accept irony through a device called metaphor. And through that we grow and become deeper human beings."
"If I sound as if I'm always predicting ominous things, it's because I'm a pragmatist. I use deductive reasoning to generalize, and I suppose this sometimes ends up sounding like unlucky prophecies. You know why? Because reality's just the accumulation of ominous prophecies come to life. You have to only open a newspaper on any given day and weigh the good news versus the bad, and you'll see what I mean."
"I talked about the barriers created by monopolies. I said that it was the role of government to break up these monopolies and that we couldn't do it alone."
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