Quotes by Sseki Natsume

“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...”

“There, sitting cross-legged on the floor, he stared absently at his legs. They began to look strange. They no longer seemed to grow from his trunk at all, but rather, completely unconnected, they s...”

“We who are born into this age of freedom and independence and the self must undergo this loneliness. It is the price we pay for these times of ours.”

“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.”

“I often laughed, and you often gave me a dissatisfied look, till you pressed me to unfold my past before you as if it were a roll of pictures. It was then I felt respect for you. Because you unrese...”

“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...”

“That K was hesitant in love does not mean that his love was in any sense lukewarm. He was unable to move, despite the violence of his emotion. And since the impact of his new emotion was not so gre...”

“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...”

“All you do is think. Because all you do is think, you've constructed two separate worldsone inside your head and one outside. Just the fact that you tolerate this enormous dissonancewhy, that's a g...”

“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.”

“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.”

“[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.”

“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 ...”