Sōseki Natsume

“Desire is a frightening thing.”

“He had always been a middle-of-the-road sort. He had never submitted word for word to anyone's command, but neither had he passionately rebelled against anyone's advice. Depending upon the interpretation, this was the posture of a schemer or the strategy of a born vacillator. If he himself had been confronted with either of these charges, he could not have avoided wondering if they might not be true. But in large part, this was to be attributed neither to artifice nor to vacillation but rather to the flexibility of his vision, which allowed him to look in both directions at once. To this day, it was precisely this capacity that had always dampened his determination to advance singlemindedly toward a particular goal. It was not unusual for him to stand paralyzed in the midst of a situation. His posture of upholding the status quo was not the result of poverty of thought, but the product of lucid judgment; but he had never understood this truth about himself until he acted upon his beliefs with inviolable courage. The situation with Michiyo was precisely a case in point.”

“He seemed to become aware of a dark, imponderable force pushing him left when he meant to go right or pulling him back when he meant to go forward. Until that moment, hewould have felt certain that his actions had never been subject to restraintby others. He had been certain that he did whatever he did of his ownaccord, that everything he said he intended to say.”

“People forget their faces when they're busy.”

“The memory of having sat at someone’s feet will later make you want to trample him underfoot. I’m trying to fend off your admiration for me, you see, in order to save myself from your future contempt. I prefer to put up with my present state of loneliness rather than suffer more loneliness later. We who are born into this age of freedom and independence and the self must undergo this loneliness. It’s the price we pay for these times of ours.”

“Hirota feels strongly drawn toward nature and the natural, is hyper-sensitive to the artificial—particularly that most cramped and constraining man-made creation, society—and does his best to avoid it.”

“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.”

“No matter how full one's head might be with the image of greatness, one was useless, I found out, unless one was a worthy man first.”

“I am a lonely man," he said again that evening. "And is it not possible that you are also a lonely person? But I am an older man, and I can live with my loneliness, quietly. You are young, and it must be difficult to accept your loneliness. You must sometimes want to fight it.""But I am not at all lonely.""Youth is the loneliest time of all. Otherwise, why should you come so often to my house?"Sensei continued: "But surely, when you are with me, you cannot rid yourself of your loneliness. I have not it in me to help you forget it. You will have to look elsewhere for the consolation you seek. And soon, you will find that you no longer want to visit me."As he said this, Sensei smiled sadly.”

“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.”

“The call for political freedom took place long ago. The call for freedom of speech is also a thing of the past. Freedom is not a word to be used exclusively for phenomena such as this which are so easily given outward manifestation. I believe that we young men of the new age have encountered the moment in time when we must call for that great freedom, the freedom of the mind.”

“There was nothing so very unfamiliar about the excitement she was feeling, and yet it felt always like a new excitement. It was, in other words, a perennially unfamiliar feeling.”

“Your addiction to thinking will come back to haunt you.”

“It’s so unrewarding, being a woman.”

“Over the wintry forest, winds howl in rage with no leaves to blow.”

“Use your intellect to guide you, and you will end up putting peopleoff. Rely on your emotions, and you will forever be pushed around.Force your will on others, and you will live in constant tension. Thereis no getting around it—people are hard to live with.”

“When I was a student, there wasn't a single thing we did that was unrelated to others. It was all for the Emperor, or parents, or the country, or society—everything was other-centered, which means that all educated men were hypocrites. When society changed, this hypocrisy ceased to work, and as a result, self-centeredness was gradually imported into thought and action, and egoism became enormously over-developed. Instead of the old hypocrites, now all we've got are out-and-out rogues. Do you see what I mean by that?”

“We who are born into this age of freedom and independence and the self must undergo this loneliness. It is the price we pay for these times of ours.”

“There, sitting cross-legged on the floor, he stared absently at his legs. They began to look strange. They no longer seemed to grow from his trunk at all, but rather, completely unconnected, they sprawled rudely before him. When he got this far, he realized something he had never noticed before—that his legs were unbearably hideous. With hair growing unevenly and blue streaks running rampant, they were terribly strange creatures.”

“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.”