62 quotes found
“He was grand in his convictions. He would stride forward to meet his own destruction.”
“Desire is a frightening thing.”
“It seems to me that you might create any sort of character in a novel and there would be at least one person in the world just like him. We humans are simply incapable of imagining non-human action...”
“I thought of the new stone, of my new wife, and of the newly buried white bones beneath us, and I felt that fate had made sport of us all.”
“He had always been a middle-of-the-road sort. He had never submitted word for word to anyone's command, but neither had he passionately rebelled against anyone's advice. Depending upon the interpre...”
“Daisuke was of course equipped with conversation that, even if they went further, would allow him to retreat as if nothing had happened. He had always wondered at the conversations recorded in West...”
“Your addiction to thinking will come back to haunt you.”
“People forget their faces when they're busy.”
“There was a time when his father had looked like gold to him. Many of his seniors had looked like gold. Anybody who had attained a certain high level of education had looked like gold. Therefore, h...”
“No matter how full one's head might be with the image of greatness, one was useless, I found out, unless one was a worthy man first.”
“On the whole, all people are good, or at least they're normal. The frightening thing is that they can suddenly turn bad when it comes to the crunch.”
“[T]he very color of the air in the place I was born was different, the smell of the earth was special, redolent with memories of my parents.”
“here was no way of knowing what path he would take from there, but in order to survive as a human being, he was sure to arrive at the fate of having to incur the dislike of other human beings. When...”
“All you do is think. Because all you do is think, you've constructed two separate worlds—one inside your head and one outside. Just the fact that you tolerate this enormous dissonance—why, that's a...”
“There is nothing more difficult than understanding human mentality. My master's present mental state is very far from clear; is he feeling angry or lighthearted, or simply seeking solace in the scr...”
“He framed a question inwardly to his vanity: 'Will this be tougher than I thought?”
“Knowing that it is the earth we tread, we learn to tread carefully, lest it be rent open. Realizing that it is the heavens that hang above us, we come to fear the echoing thunderbolt. The world dem...”
“I've been mistaken to assume that in this little village in the spring, so like a dream or a poem, life is a matter only of the singing birds, the falling blossoms, and the bubbling springs. The re...”
“No matter how fierce was the passion that gripped him, the fact is he was paralyzed, transfixed by the contemplation of his own past. Only something so momentous as to drive from his consciousness ...”
“That's a good point," Professor Hirota said. "But there is one thing we ought to keep in mind in the study of man. Namely, that a human being placed in particular circumstances has the ability and ...”
