When people who have been close don't see each other for a time, they become strangers. But when two people live together, no matter how bad things may get between them, they somehow manage to stay close. I suppose human beings are made that way.
-Natsume Sōseki
When I call him a fool, I mean it only in the sense that he was just as pitiful a creature as I was, and implying the sympathy of one fool for another.
-Natsume Sōseki
Their faces, which on the way down had filled me with such loathing, now seemed like clay dolls’ heads. They were not ugly, not frightening, not hateful. They were just faces, as the face of the most beautiful woman in Japan is just a face. And I was exactly like these men, a human being of flesh and bone, entirely ordinary and entirely meaningless.
-Natsume Sōseki
The only way to become “normal” is to make a lot of allies and do the abnormal as though it were entirely normal. I still haven’t tried this, but I’m sure it would work.
-Natsume Sōseki
The human heart, it seems to me after careful consideration, is like water. Push it and it gives way; pull back, and it comes flowing in.
-Natsume Sōseki
Novelists congratulate themselves on their creation of this kind of “character” or that kind of “character,” and readers pretend to talk knowingly about “character,” but all it amounts to is that the writers are enjoying themselves writing lies and the readers are enjoying themselves reading lies. In fact, there is no such thing as character, something fixed and final. The real thing is something that novelists don’t know how to write about. Or, if they tried, the end result would never be a novel. Real people are strangely difficult to make sense out of. Even a god would have his hands full trying.
-Natsume Sōseki
I had known the word “passive” since I was a kid, but now its meaning became clear to me for the first time in a moment of enlightenment
-Natsume Sōseki
I don’t know if any of you have heard the sound of a human voice without warning on a lonely road at night, but let me tell you, it can make you feel very weird.
-Natsume Sōseki
Human beings are supposed to get angry now and then, they’re supposed to rebel. That’s how they’re made. Forcing yourself to become a creature that doesn’t get angry and never rebels is tantamount to happily educating yourself to be an idiot.
-Natsume Sōseki
However bad you may feel, however great your anguish, however convinced you may be that your soul is trying to escape, your stomach empties itself out just fine.
-Natsume Sōseki
And if it turned out that I had to go to some kind of Hell when I died, I’d probably choose a Hell with demons over one where there was nobody besides me.
-Natsume Sōseki
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, his own gold plating had been all the more painful, and he had been impatient to become solid gold himself. But once his keen eye penetrated directly to the inner layers of these other people, his efforts suddenly came to seem foolish.
-Natsume Sōseki
If he let one day pass without glancing at a single page, habit led him to feel a vague sense of decay. Therefore, in the face of most intrusions, he tried to arrange it so that he could stay in touch with the printed word. There were moments when he felt that books constituted his only legitimate province.
-Natsume Sōseki
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 time came, he would probably clothe himself inconspicuously, so as not to attract attention, and beggarlike, linger about the market places of man, in search of something.
-Natsume Sōseki
