Quotes from book

A Personal Matter

“It takes a person of great care and insight to watch for any abnormality in the green grass even while it grows abundantly and healthily.”

“We naturally try to forget our personal tragedies, serious or trifling, as soon as possible (even something as petty as being scorned or disdained by a stranger on a street corner). We try not to carry these things over to tomorrow. It is not strange, therefore, that the whole human race is trying to put Hiroshima, the extreme point of human tragedy, completely out of mind.”

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

“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.”

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

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

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

“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.”

“Every time you stand at a crossroads of life and death, you have two universes in front of you; one loses all relation to you because you die, the other maintains its relation to you because you survive in it. Just as you would take off your clothes, you abandon the universe in which you are still alive. In other words, various universes emerge around each of us the way tree limbs and leaves branch away from the trunk.”