xy

@xy, member from Sept. 25, 2023

Favourite quotes (21448)

“There could be joy in destruction, too, couldn’t there? Isn’t Jesus Christ’s Second Coming supposed to occur only after a lot of unmitigated destruction? But again, human history is fraught with tragedies in which man spared no effort to destroy with millenarian joy, only to learn that no messiah appeared afterwards.”

Kenzaburō Ōe (1935) Japanese author

p 90
Shizuka-na seikatsu (A Quiet Life) (1990)

“My mentally handicapped son Hikari was awakened by the voices of birds to the music of Bach and Mozart, eventually composing his own works. The little pieces that he first composed were full of fresh splendour and delight. They seemed like dew glittering on grass leaves. The word innocence is composed of in — "not" and nicer — "hurt", that is, "not to hurt". Hikari's music was in this sense a natural effusion of the composer's own innocence.”

Kenzaburō Ōe (1935) Japanese author

Japan, The Ambiguous, and Myself (1994)

“I don’t think young people need to see the face of the deceased.”

Kenzaburō Ōe (1935) Japanese author

p 63
Shizuka-na seikatsu (A Quiet Life) (1990)

“If any suffering was fruitless it was the agony of a hangover; what he suffered now could not expiate suffering of any other kind.”

Kenzaburō Ōe book A Personal Matter

A Personal Matter (1964)

“The ideal teacher student relationship exists when the student is better than the teacher.”

Kenzaburō Ōe (1935) Japanese author

p 92
Shizuka-na seikatsu (A Quiet Life) (1990)

“To be upright and to have an imagination: that is enough to be a very good young man.”

Kenzaburō Ōe (1935) Japanese author

Conversations with History interview (1999)

“Now I was just a transient in the valley, a one-eyed passerby too fat for his years, and life there had the power to summon up neither the memory nor the illusion of any other, truer self. As a passerby I had a right to insist on my identity.”

Kenzaburō Ōe book A Personal Matter

A Personal Matter (1964)

“It's a little bit like what Akari said to his grandmother in Shikoku, during her final illness: 'Please cheer up and die!”

Kenzaburō Ōe book A Personal Matter

A Personal Matter (1964)

“I think the question for him is, how is a faithless person to cope with life. This is where he believes he can find something upon which to establish a literary career. You know, don’t you, how often he talks of Yeats? This goes way back, to when he was very young.”

Kenzaburō Ōe (1935) Japanese author

p 52
Shizuka-na seikatsu (A Quiet Life) (1990)

“I was on a promotional tour in Great Britain, and I stopped in Wales. I was there for three days and I ran out of books to read. I went to a local bookstore and asked the person working there to recommend some books in English. He suggested a collection by a poet who was from the area but warned me that the book wasn’t selling very well. The poet was R. S. Thomas, and I bought everything they had. As I read him, I realized that he was the most important poet I could be reading at that point in my life.”

Kenzaburō Ōe (1935) Japanese author

Paris Review interview (2007)

“The writer’s job is the job of a clown …the clown who also talks about sorrow.”

Kenzaburō Ōe (1935) Japanese author

Paris Review interview (2007)

“Understanding comes hard to persons of high rank who are accustomed to phony lifestyles that involve no daily work.”

Kenzaburō Ōe book A Personal Matter

A Personal Matter (1964)

“To repeat the error by exhibiting, through the construction of nuclear reactors, the same disrespect for human life is the worst possible betrayal of the memory of Hiroshima’s victims.”

Kenzaburō Ōe (1935) Japanese author

“History Repeats,” The New Yorker, March 28, 2011

“He said he didn’t care if he went to heaven or hell, because neither could be more fearful than absolute nothingness; salvation and damnation were one and the same if the only thing out there was total nothingness.”

Kenzaburō Ōe (1935) Japanese author

p 54
Shizuka-na seikatsu (A Quiet Life) (1990)

“At the nadir of the post-war economic poverty we found a resilience to endure it, never losing our hope for recovery. It may sound curious to say so, but we seem to have no less resilience to endure our anxiety about the ominous consequence emerging out of the present prosperity. From another point of view, a new situation now seems to be arising in which Japan's prosperity is going to be incorporated into the expanding potential power of both production and consumption in Asia at large.”

Kenzaburō Ōe (1935) Japanese author

Japan, The Ambiguous, and Myself (1994)

“The dead can survive as part of the lives of those that still live.”

Kenzaburō Ōe book A Personal Matter

A Personal Matter (1964)

“I have a habit to be reborn as a writer. So if I find myself in a crisis that I have never experienced, I can be born, or I can write something, by the power of the habit. Even a soldier or a farmer or a fisherman can be reborn by the power of the habit when he meets the greatest crisis of his life.”

Kenzaburō Ōe (1935) Japanese author

Conversations with History interview (1999)

“The fundamental style of my writing has been to start from my personal matters and then to link it up with society, the state and the world.”

Kenzaburō Ōe (1935) Japanese author

Japan, The Ambiguous, and Myself (1994)

“The people of Hiroshima went to work at once to restore human society in the aftermath of the great atomic flood. They were concerned to salvage their own lives, but in the process they also salvaged the souls of the people who have brought the atomic bomb.”

Kenzaburō Ōe book A Personal Matter

A Personal Matter (1964)

“The readers can not expect that words will ever come out of these poems and get through to us. One can never understand or feel sympathetic towards these Zen poems except by giving oneself up and willingly penetrating into the closed shells of those words.”

Kenzaburō Ōe (1935) Japanese author

Japan, The Ambiguous, and Myself (1994)
Context: Under that title Kawabata talked about a unique kind of mysticism which is found not only in Japanese thought but also more widely Oriental thought. By 'unique' I mean here a tendency towards Zen Buddhism. Even as a twentieth-century writer Kawabata depicts his state of mind in terms of the poems written by medieval Zen monks. Most of these poems are concerned with the linguistic impossibility of telling truth. According to such poems words are confined within their closed shells. The readers can not expect that words will ever come out of these poems and get through to us. One can never understand or feel sympathetic towards these Zen poems except by giving oneself up and willingly penetrating into the closed shells of those words.