Ryūnosuke Akutagawa · 268 pages
Rating: (4.8K votes)
“I have no conscience at all -- least of all an artistic conscience. All I have is nerves.”
― Ryūnosuke Akutagawa, quote from Rashōmon and Seventeen Other Stories
“I have heard unsavory rumors about you and the umbrella-maker's daughter”
― Ryūnosuke Akutagawa, quote from Rashōmon and Seventeen Other Stories
“He disliked his own lies as much as his parents', but still he continued to lie -- boldly and cunningly. He did this primarily out of need, but also for the pathological pleasure of killing a god.”
― Ryūnosuke Akutagawa, quote from Rashōmon and Seventeen Other Stories
“The human heart harbors two conflicting sentiments. Everyone of course sympathizes with people who suffer misfortunes. Yet when those people manage to overcome their misfortunes, we feel a certain disappointment. We may even feel (to overstate the case somewhat) a desire to plunge them back into those misfortunes. And before we know it, we come (if only passively) to harbor some degree of hostility toward them.”
― Ryūnosuke Akutagawa, quote from Rashōmon and Seventeen Other Stories
“The cable was still sending sharp sparks into the air. He could think of nothing in life that he especially desired, but those purple sparks--those wildly-blooming flowers of fire--he would trade his life for the chance to hold them in his hands."
-from "The Life of a Stupid Man”
― Ryūnosuke Akutagawa, quote from Rashōmon and Seventeen Other Stories
“When I kill a man, I do it with my sword, but people like you don't use swords. You gentlemen kill with your power, with your money, and sometimes just with your words: you tell people you're doing them a favor. True, no blood flows, the man is still alive, but you've killed him all the same. I don't know whose sin is greater―yours or mine. (A sarcastic smile.)”
― Ryūnosuke Akutagawa, quote from Rashōmon and Seventeen Other Stories
“I've heard you want to die," she said.
"Yes—or rather, it's not so much that I want to die as that I'm tired of living.”
― Ryūnosuke Akutagawa, quote from Rashōmon and Seventeen Other Stories
“Life is more hellish than hell itself.”
― Ryūnosuke Akutagawa, quote from Rashōmon and Seventeen Other Stories
“At twenty-nine, life no longer held any brightness for him, but Voltaire supplied him with man-made wings.
Spreading these man-made wings, he soared with ease into the sky. The higher he flew, the farther below him sank the joys and sorrows of a life bathed in the light of the intellect. Dropping ironies and smiles upon the shabby towns below, he climbed through the open sky, straight for the sun--as if he had forgotten about that ancient Greek who plunged to his death in the ocean when his man-made wings were singed by the sun."
-from "The Life of a Stupid Man”
― Ryūnosuke Akutagawa, quote from Rashōmon and Seventeen Other Stories
“Everyone is the same under the skin.”
― Ryūnosuke Akutagawa, quote from Rashōmon and Seventeen Other Stories
“These works are handed down from teacher to pupil, from parent to child, almost without question, like DNA. They are memorized, recited, discussed in book reports, included in university entrance exams, and once the student is grown up, they become a source for quotation. They are made into movies again and again, they are parodied, and inevitably they become the object of ambitious young writers’ revolt and contempt.”
― Ryūnosuke Akutagawa, quote from Rashōmon and Seventeen Other Stories
“That’s because, in a way different from what you meant by it, you can’t trust anybody.” Major Kimura lit a new cigar and, smiling, continued in tones that were almost exultantly cheerful. “It is important—even necessary—for us to become acutely aware of the fact that we can’t trust ourselves. The only ones you can trust to some extent are people who really know that. We had better get this straight. Otherwise, our own characters’ heads could fall off like Xiao-er’s at any time.”
― Ryūnosuke Akutagawa, quote from Rashōmon and Seventeen Other Stories
“إن سمو الحياة يصل ذروته في أكثر لحظات الإلهام قربًا من القلب، والإنسان
سيجعل حياته جديرة بأن تعاش إذا رفع بوجهه عاليًا نحو السماء المتشحة بالنجوم
متجاوزاً الاهتمامات الدنيوية المظلمة لهذة الحياة، ليعكس على صقال زبدها البللوري
سنا بدر لم يطل بعد.”
― Ryūnosuke Akutagawa, quote from Rashōmon and Seventeen Other Stories
“وكل ما ظل فيه بلا تغيير هو لون عينيه اللتين تشبهان النجوم. واللتين مضتا تتطلعان عالياً نحو السماء.”
― Ryūnosuke Akutagawa, quote from Rashōmon and Seventeen Other Stories
“Life is not worth a single line of Baudelaire."
-from "The Life of a Stupid Man”
― Ryūnosuke Akutagawa, quote from Rashōmon and Seventeen Other Stories
“This is all for the sake of the House,” he told himself, but behind his resolve he sensed, indistinctly, a certain effort at self-vindication, and the awareness hovered there like a barely perceptible halo around the moon.”
― Ryūnosuke Akutagawa, quote from Rashōmon and Seventeen Other Stories
“As rumor had said, he found several corpses strewn carelessly about the floor. Since the glow of the light was feeble, he could not count the number. He could only see that some were naked and others clothed. Some of them were women, and all were lolling on the floor with their mouths open or their arms outstretched showing no more signs of life than so many clay dolls. One would doubt they had ever been alive, so eternally silent they were.”
― Ryūnosuke Akutagawa, quote from Rashōmon and Seventeen Other Stories
Ryūnosuke Akutagawa
Born place: in Tokyo, Japan
Born date March 1, 1892
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“Twinkle twinkle little star. You are nothing. You've been dead for a thousand years...”
― Lynda Barry, quote from Cruddy
“Deception, as practically manifested, succeeds because of two things. First, the object of deception is convincingly deceptive in its design; i.e., it looks/feels/acts like the real thing. Second, and equally important, the subject of deception must be predisposed to believing that the object of deception is indeed the real thing. These two criteria work in an inverse relationship with each other; a sufficiently deceptive object can convince a skeptical subject, while a subject who sincerely wants to believe will be able to overlook even gross flaws in the object onto which he or she confers belief.”
― John Scalzi, quote from The Android's Dream
“Maybe man is nothing in particular,' Cross said gropingly. 'Maybe that's the terror of it. Man may be just anything at all. And maybe man deep down suspects this, really knows this, kind of dreams that it is true; but at the same time he does not want really to know it? May not human life on this earth be a kind of frozen fear of man at what he could possibly be? And every move he makes might not these moves be just to hide this awful fact? To twist it into something which he feels would make him rest and breathe a little easier? What man is is perhaps too much to be borne by man...”
― Richard Wright, quote from The Outsider
“Must I accept the barren Gift?
-learn death, and lose my Mastery?
Then let them know whose blood and breath
will take the Gift and set them free:
whose is the voice and whose the mind
to set at naught the well-sung Game-
when finned Finality arrives
and calls me by my secret Name.
Not old enough to love as yet,
but old enough to die, indeed-
-the death-fear bites my throat and heart,
fanged cousin to the Pale One's breed.
But past the fear lies life for all-
perhaps for me: and, past my dread,
past loss of Mastery and life,
the Sea shall yet give up Her dead!
Lone Power, I accept your Gift!
Freely I make death a part of me;
By my accept it is bound
into the lives of all the Sea-
yet what I do now binds to it
a gift I feel of equal worth:
I take Death with me, out of Time,
and make of it a path, a birth!
Let the teeth come! As they tear me,
they tear Your ancient hate for aye-
-so rage, proud Power! Fail again,
and see my blood teach Death to die!”
― Diane Duane, quote from Deep Wizardry
“Grief was just the moment before you tied off the thread and began the next one. That was when you made your choice about what you were going to sew next.”
― Elizabeth Chadwick, quote from Lady of the English
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