Kōbō Abe

“If animal history has been a history of evolution, then the history of mankind is one of retrogression. Hooray for monsters! Monsters are the great embodiments of the weak.”

“Loneliness—since I was trying to escape it—was hell; and yet for the hermit who seeks it, it is apparently happiness.”

“The world itself, like the mask, began to seem difficult to believe in, and I was stricken with an unutterable sense of loneliness.”

“It’s a real handicap to have a face with shifty eyes.”

“You can only do what you can no matter how you try.”

“And again, the dark street. The dark, dark street. The women out shopping for the evening meal of course, and baby carriage and the silver bicycle were already painted out by the darkness; most of the commuters too were already in place in their filing-drawer houses. A half-forsaken chasm of time ....”

“These days only a guerrilla or a box man would want to cover up his identity to the extent of refusing the convenience of instalment buying. But I am that box man. A representative of anti-instalmentism.”

“If I were just in trousers, somehow I could go out into the world. It would make no difference whether I was naked from the waist up and my feet bare just as long as I had trousers on. Otherwise if you go walking around the streets without trousers, no matter how new your shoes and how elegant your coat, it’s enough to raise a big hue and cry. Enlightened society is a kind of trouser society.”

“Clinging to one’s outward appearance interferes with living.”

“When will you ever accept the true ugliness of health?”

“There wasn't a single item of importance [in the newspaper]. A tower of illusion, all of it, made of illusory bricks and full of holes. If life were made up only of imporant things, it really would be a dangerous house of glass, scarcely to be handled carelessly. But everyday life was exactly like the headlines. And so everybody, knowing the meaninglessness of existence, sets the centre of his compass at his own home.”

“I want to spy on all sorts of places, and the box is a portable hole that occurred to me under the circumstances, it being impossible to punch holes throughout the world.”

“One measure of a civilization, in fact, is the percentage of misfits in its society.”

“Just as trees bear their fruit before winter, just as bamboo grass produces its seeds just before it withers, sex is simply a struggle with death on the human level.”

“The future is forever a projection of the present.”

“Something whose connection with human experience we cannot grasp is bound to be frightening.”

“Do you shovel to survive, or survive to shovel?”

“Defeat begins with the fear that one had lost.”