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

How dearly, indeed, I loved my pit, my dusky room, the area of my desk with its piles of books! How I enjoyed introspection, shrouded myself in cogitation; with what rapture did I listen for the rustling of frail insects in the thickets of my nerves!

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

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.

A man isn't tiny or giant enough to defeat anything

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

There's a huge seal called 'impossibility' pasted all over this world. And don't ever forget that we're the only ones who can tear it off once and for all.

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

For clearly it is impossible to touch eternity with one hand and life with the other.

I am one who has always been interested only in the edges of the body and the spirit, the outlying regions of the body and the outlying regions of the spirit. The depths hold no interest for me; I leave them to others, for they are shallow, commonplace.

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

The highest point at which human life and art meet is in the ordinary. To look down on the ordinary is to despise what you can't have. Show me a man who fears being ordinary, and I'll show you a man who is not yet a man.

Still immersed in his dream, he drank down the tepid tea. It tasted bitter. Glory, as anyone knows, is bitter stuff.

Beauty is something that burns the hand when you touch it.

An ugliness unfurled in the moonlight and soft shadow and suffused the whole world. If I were an amoeba, he thought, with an infinitesimal body, I could defeat ugliness. A man isn’t tiny or giant enough to defeat anything.

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

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

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.

I want to make a poem of my life.