Whenever anyone criticized me I felt certain that I had been living under the most dreadful misapprehension. I always accepted the attack in silence, though inwardly so terrified as almost to be out of my mind.
What is society but an individual?
There are some people whose dread of human beings is so morbid that they reach a point where they yearn to see with their own eyes monsters of ever more horrible shapes.
Human beings are like that, though. They’ll do the most unbelievably cruel things when you least expect it.
When I lay next to her my body was enveloped in her current, which mingled with my own harsher current of gloom like a “ withered leaf settling to rest on the stones at the bottom of a pool.” I had freed myself from fear and uneasiness.
Nevertheless, I still wait for someone. Who on earth am I waiting for, sitting here everyday? For what sort of person? Maybe what I’m waiting for isn’t even a human. I dislike humans. No, I fear them. When I meet someone and indifferently exchange such greetings as ‘How are you?’ or ‘It’s become cold’, greetings I don’t want to make, I somehow get the unpleasant feeling that there is no such horrible liar in the whole world as I, and I wish I were dead.
Learning is a another name of vanity, It is the effort of human beings not to be human beings.
If he wears a tag, doesn’t that make him harmless? It sounds rather sweet, like a kitten with a bell around its neck. A dissolute character without a tag is what frightens me.
Despising each other as we did, we were constantly together, thereby degrading ourselves. If that is what the world calls friendship, the relations between Horiki and myself were undoubtedly those of friendship.
The incomprehensibility of society is the incomprehensibility of the individual. The ocean is not society; it is the individual.
Whenever I let the slightest thing make me forget myself, I can’t help but be disappointed.
I didn’t know whether it was better to maintain a fierce distinction between yourself and your acquaintances in society in order to deal with and respond properly to things in a pleasant manner, or rather never to hide yourself, to remain true to yourself always, even if they say bad things about you.
I have never derived the least joy out of amusements. Perhaps that is a sign of the impotence of pleasure. I ran riot and threw myself into wild diversions out of the simple desire to escape from my own shadow.
The color of this sky, what would you call it? Rose? Flame? Iridescent? The color of angel’s wings? Or a huge temple? No, it is none of these things. It is much more sublime.
My definition of a “respected” man was one who had succeeded almost completely in hoodwinking people.
I was afraid to go into a restaurant because I was intimidated by the waiters furtively hovering behind me waiting for my plate to be emptied. Most of all I dreaded paying a bill-my awkwardness when I handed over the money after buying something did not arise from my stinginess, but from excessive tension, excessive embarrassment, excessive uneasiness and apprehension.
God, I ask you. Is trustfulness a sin?
I must go on living. And, though it may be childish of me, I can’t go on in simple compliance. From now on I must struggle with the world. I thought that Mother might well be the last of those who can end their lives beautifully and sadly, struggling with no one, neither hating nor betraying anyone. In the world to come there will be no room for such people. The dying are beautiful, but to live, to survive – those things somehow seem hideous and contaminated with blood.
I have frantically played the clown in order to distangle myself from these painful relationships, only to wear myself out as a result.
Are “people in the world”, I wonder, creatures that spend their whole lives greeting each other in stiff, formal patterns, being cautious about each other, then growing tired of each other? I hate meeting people.