“Loneliness was an unsatisfied thirst for illusion.”
― Kōbō Abe, quote from 砂の女 [Suna no onna]
“One could not do without repetition in life, like the beating of the heart, but it was also true that the beating of the heart was not all there was to life.”
― Kōbō Abe, quote from 砂の女 [Suna no onna]
“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.”
― Kōbō Abe, quote from 砂の女 [Suna no onna]
“Everyone has his own philosophy that doesn't hold good for anybody else.”
― Kōbō Abe, quote from 砂の女 [Suna no onna]
“He wanted to believe that his own lack of movement had stopped all movement in the world, the way a hibernating frog abolishes winter.”
― Kōbō Abe, quote from 砂の女 [Suna no onna]
“Only the happy ones return to contentment. Those who were sad return to despair.”
― Kōbō Abe, quote from 砂の女 [Suna no onna]
“I rather think the world is like sand. The fundamental nature of sand is very difficult to grasp when you think of it in its stationary state. Sand not only flows, but this very flow is the sand.”
― Kōbō Abe, quote from 砂の女 [Suna no onna]
“What in heaven's name was the real essence of this beauty? Was it the precision of nature with its physical laws, or was it nature's mercilessness, ceaselessly resisting man's understanding?”
― Kōbō Abe, quote from 砂の女 [Suna no onna]
“If there were no risk of a punishment, a getaway would lose the pleasure.”
― Kōbō Abe, quote from 砂の女 [Suna no onna]
“If from the beginning you always believed that a ticket was only one-way, then you wouldn't have to try so vainly to cling to the sand like an oyster to a rock.”
― Kōbō Abe, quote from 砂の女 [Suna no onna]
“The only way to go beyond work is through work. It is not that work itself is valuable; we surmount work by work. The real value of work lies in the strength of self-denial.”
― Kōbō Abe, quote from 砂の女 [Suna no onna]
“Certainly sand was not suitable for life. Yet, was a stationary condition absolutely indispensable for existence? Didn't unpleasant competition arise precisely because one tried to cling to a fixed position? If one were to give up a fixed position and abandon oneself to the movement of the sands, competition would soon stop. Actually, in the deserts flowers bloomed and insects and other animals lived their lives. These creatures were able to escape competition through their great ability to adjust--for example, the man's beetle family.
While he mused on the effect of the flowing sands, he was seized from time to time by hallucinations in which he himself began to move with the flow.”
― Kōbō Abe, quote from 砂の女 [Suna no onna]
“The fish you don't catch is always the biggest.”
― Kōbō Abe, quote from 砂の女 [Suna no onna]
“This crazy, blind beating of wings caused by man-made light... this irrational connection between spiders, moths and light. If a law appeared without reason, like this, what would one believe in?”
― Kōbō Abe, quote from 砂の女 [Suna no onna]
“His expression hardened. It was unpleasant to have feelings that he had been at pains to check aroused to no purpose”
― Kōbō Abe, quote from 砂の女 [Suna no onna]
“Когда на тебя смотрят, а ты делаешь что-то гадкое — это гадкое в той же степени марает и тех, кто смотрит.”
― Kōbō Abe, quote from 砂の女 [Suna no onna]
“Будем каждое утро тщательно разглаживать любовь утюгом…”
― Kōbō Abe, quote from 砂の女 [Suna no onna]
“Нет иного пути возвыситься над трудом, как посредством самого труда. Не труд сам по себе имеет ценность, а преодоление труда трудом… Истинная ценность труда в силе его самоотрицания…”
― Kōbō Abe, quote from 砂の女 [Suna no onna]
“Sand, which didn't even have a form of it's own. Yet, not a single thing could stand against this shapeless, destructive power. The very fact that it had no form was doubtless the highest manifestation of its strenght, was it not?”
― Kōbō Abe, quote from 砂の女 [Suna no onna]
“The beauty of sand, in other words, belonged to death. it was the beauty of death that ran through the magnificence of its ruins and its great power of destruction”
― Kōbō Abe, quote from 砂の女 [Suna no onna]
“The barrenness of sand, as it is usually pictured, was not caused by simple dryness, but apparently was due to the ceaseless movement that made it inhospitable to all living things. What a difference compared with the dreary way human beings clung together year in year out.”
― Kōbō Abe, quote from 砂の女 [Suna no onna]
“And so, one bit one's nails, unable to find contentment in the simple beating of one's heart... one smoked, unable to be satisfied with the rhythm of one's brain...”
― Kōbō Abe, quote from 砂の女 [Suna no onna]
“Más que de la mujer, el hombre tiende a enamorarse de los fragmentos y detalles de las cosas.”
― Kōbō Abe, quote from 砂の女 [Suna no onna]
“انگار هر زن عادی جداً معتقد است که نمیتواند مرد را به ارزش خود واقف کند، مگر اینکه خودش را به او عرضه کند، چنان کند که انگار صحنهای از یک داستان عاشقانه است. اما این توهم رقتانگیز و معصومانه در حقیقت زن را قربانی یک طرفهی تجاوزی روحی میکرد.”
― Kōbō Abe, quote from 砂の女 [Suna no onna]
“The same sand currents had swallowed up and destroyed flourishing cities and great empires. They called it the "sabulation" of the Roman Empire, if he remembered rightly.”
― Kōbō Abe, quote from 砂の女 [Suna no onna]
“-Well, what happens with the River of Hades in the end?
-Not a thing. It's an infernal punishment precisely because nothing happens.”
― Kōbō Abe, quote from 砂の女 [Suna no onna]
“There are all kinds of life, and sometimes the other side of the hill looks greener. What's hardest for me is not knowing what living like this will ever come to.”
― Kōbō Abe, quote from 砂の女 [Suna no onna]
“Defeat begins with the fear that one had lost.”
― Kōbō Abe, quote from 砂の女 [Suna no onna]
Kōbō Abe
Born place: in Kita, Tokyo, Japan
Born date March 7, 1924
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“This is the status of the Bible in modern life: it is a sublime answer, but we do not know the question any more. Unless we recover the question, there is no hope of understanding the Bible.”
― Abraham Joshua Heschel, quote from God in Search of Man: A Philosophy of Judaism
“Schooling as it presently exists, like science before and religion before that, is necessary to the continuation of our culture and to the spawning of a new species of human, ever more submissive to authority, ever more pliant, prepared, by thirteen years of sitting and receiving, sitting and regurgitating, sitting and waiting for the end, prepared for the rest of their lives to toil, to propagate, to never make waves, and to live each day with never an original thought nor even a shred of hope.”
― Derrick Jensen, quote from A Language Older Than Words
“...I am forever loving, forever waiting, forever yearning... forever yours.”
― Charlotte Featherstone, quote from Addicted
“for a man functions best if he ventures out into the world from a domestic setting in which his restless sexual and procreative energies are given liberty.”
― Fay Weldon, quote from The Life and Loves of a She Devil
“I don’t need your praise
to survive. I was here first,
before you were here, before
you ever planted a garden.
And I’ll be here when only the sun and moon
are left, and the sea, and the wide field.
I will constitute the field.”
― Louise Glück, quote from The Wild Iris
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