Again and again, the cicada’s untiring cry pierced the sultry summer air like a needle at work on thick cotton cloth.

Human life is limited but I would like to live forever.

The cynicism that regards hero worship as comical is always shadowed by a sense of physical inferiority

For me, beauty is always retreating from one’s grasp: the only thing I consider important is what existed once, or ought to have existed.

It is a common failing of childhood to think that if one makes a hero out of a demon the demon will be satisfied.

No human being can be so honest as to become completely false.

All six of us are geniuses. And the world, as you know, is empty.

Thus in a single phrase I can define the great illusion concerning 'love' in this world. It is the effort to join reality with the apparition.

Human beings, Isao realized, could descend to communicating their feelings like dogs barking in the distance on a cold night.

A father is a reality-concealing machine, a machine for dishing up lies to kids, and that isn't even the worst of it: secretly he believes that he represents reality.

The parting, like the white fruit of an apple discolouring instantly around the bite, had begun three days before when they had met aboard the Rakuyo.

It seemed that hell could appear day or night, at any time, at any place, simply in response to one's thoughts or wishes. It seemed that we could summon it at our pleasure and that instantly it would appear.

There is no virtue in curiosity. In fact, it might even be the most immoral desire a man can possess.

Beyond doubt it would speedily verify the proverb that a nation must ravage itself before foreigners can ravage it, a man must despise himself before others can despise him.

Let the darkness that is in my heart become equal to the darkness of the night that surrounds those innumerable lights!

Everybody's the same. People are all the same. But it’s the prerogative of youth to think it’s not so.

…In the very simplicity of her desire to punish herself appeared egoism in its purest form. Never before had this woman who seemed to think only of herself experienced an egoism so immaculate.

We human beings sometimes steer off in a direction in which we hope to find something a little bit better.

We all know that the world is empty and that the important thing, the only thing, is to try to maintain order in that emptiness.

Just now I had a dream. I'll see you again. I know it. Beneath the falls.

The perfectly ordinary girl and the great philosopher are alike: for both, the smallest triviality can become the vision that wipes out the world.

Because the fact of not being understood by other people had become my only real source of pride, I was never confronted by any impulse to express things and to make others understand something that I knew.

I want to make a poem of my life.

Glory, as anyone knows, is bitter stuff.

Separation is painful, but so is its opposite. And if being together brings joy, then it is only proper that separation should do the same in its own way.

Most writers are perfectly normal in the head and just carry on like wild men; I behave normally but I'm sick inside.

The philosophy that prepares a revolution and the sentiment that underpins the philosophy have, in every case the two pillars of nihilism and mysticism.

Insensitive people are only upset when they actually see the blood, but actually by the time that the blood has been shed the tragedy has already completed.

True pain can only come gradually. It is exactly like tuberculosis in that the disease has already progressed to a critical stage before the patient becomes aware of its symptoms.

However, as words become particularized, and as men begin - in however small a way - to use them in personal, arbitrary ways, so their transformation into art begins.

They had laid the tender, down-ruffled little bird on a platter and appeared now to be pondering a way to eat out its heart without causing it distress.

This time, Fusako was able to express herself with fluency and candor. The bold letters she had been writing week after week had granted her an unexpected new freedom.

And it seemed increasingly obvious that the world would have to topple if he was to attain the glory that was rightfully his. They were consubstantial: glory and the capsized world.

That which proceeds from a man’s soul shall shape his soul; that which proceeds from his speech shall shape his speech, and deeds that proceed from his body shall shape his body.

Most people are always doubtful as to whether they are happy or not, cheerful or not. This is the normal state of happiness, as doubt is a most natural thing.

But this girl simply let my hands gather on her own small, plump hands, like flies gathering on someone who is taking a nap.

I was born with gloomy nature. I do not think I have ever known what it is to be cheerful and at ease.

Better to be caught in sudden, complete catastrophe than to be gnawed by the cancer of imagination.

He never made fun of her as her neighbors did. That was why she visited him. He felt in this mad, ugly woman five years his senior a comrade in apartness. He liked people who refused to recognize the world.

Those words of my friend were like fertilizer poured over the poisonous weed of an idea deeply planted in me.

As long as conscious desire is at work, it will permit distinctions to exist. But if one can suppress it, these distinctions dissolve and one can be as content with a skull as with anything else.

You're not human. You're a being who is incapable of social intercourse. You're nothing but a creature, non-human and somehow strangely pathetic.

Why are we all burdened with the duty to destroy everything, change everything, entrust everything to impermanency? Is it this unpleasant duty that the world calls life?

What more could I have done when I did not know that to love is both to seek and to be sought? For me love was nothing but a dialogue of little riddles, with no answers given.

Prudery is a form of selfishness, a means of self-protection made necessary by the strength of one's own desires.

Otaguro’s bosom heaved with an ineffable surge of joy. “Every man is fighting,” he murmured. “Every man.

The only people in this world I really trust are my fans - even if they do forget you so fast.

One could certainly think of a man not in terms of a body but as a single vital current. And this would allow one to grasp the concept of existence as dynamic and on-going, rather than as static.

Her nose was perfect; her lips exquisite. Like a master placing a go stone on the board after long deliberation, he placed the details of her beauty one by one in the misty dark and drew back to savour them.

Always go to other people's funerals, otherwise they won't come to yours.