Nobel Laureates In Literature

"It takes a person of great care and insight to watch for any abnormality in the green grass even while it grows abundantly and healthily."

"If any suffering was fruitless it was the agony of a hangover; what he suffered now could not expiate suffering of any other kind."

"The dead can survive as part of the lives of those that still live."

"Understanding comes hard to persons of high rank who are accustomed to phony lifestyles that involve no daily work."

"At the nadir of the post-war economic poverty we found a resilience to endure it, never losing our hope for recovery. It may sound curious to say so, but we seem to have no less resilience to endure our anxiety about the ominous consequence emerging out of the present prosperity. From another point of view, a new situation now seems to be arising in which Japan's prosperity is going to be incorporated into the expanding potential power of both production and consumption in Asia at large."

"It's a little bit like what Akari said to his grandmother in Shikoku, during her final illness: 'Please cheer up and die!"

"One day Bird had approached his father with this question; he was six years old: Father, where was I a hundred years before I was born? Where will I be a hundred years after I die? Father, what will happen to me when I die? Without a word, his young father had punched him in the mouth, broke two of his teeth and bloodied his face, and Bird forgot the fear of death."

"The destination of the soul: this is what I, led on by Nils Holgersson, came to seek in the literature of Western Europe. I fervently hope that my pursuit, as a Japanese, of literature and culture will, in some small measure, repay Western Europe for the light it has shed upon the human condition."

"To repeat the error by exhibiting, through the construction of nuclear reactors, the same disrespect for human life is the worst possible betrayal of the memory of Hiroshima’s victims."

"Creativity is not limited to people practising one of the traditional forms of art, and even in the case of artists, creativity is not confined to the exercise of their art. Each one of us has a creative potential, which is hidden by competitiveness and success-aggression. To recognize, explore and develop this potential is the task of the School. Creation – whether it be a painting, sculpture, symphony or novel – involves not merely talent, intuition, powers of imagination and application, but also the ability to shape material that could be expanded to other socially relevant spheres."

"Sie muss also zu weit gehen, um herauszufinden, wie weit sie gehen darf."

"Eine Familie, die keine schwarzen Schafe hat, ist keine charakteristische Familie."

"Er meidet die überaus geschmackvollen offiziellen »Helden«friedhöfe. Warum nur, so denkt er, tun die Deutschen so viel für ihre Toten und so wenig für ihre Lebenden?"

"In the snow outside my window I see a small green frog, one eye blinking and the other wide open, unmoving, looking at me . I know this is God."

"What is essential is whether it is perceived and not whether it exists. To exist and yet not to be perceived is the same as not exist."

"Life is probably a tangle of love and hate permanently knotted together."

"Life is fragile, yet to obstinately struggle is natural."

"Not knowing what one is looking for is pure agony. Too much analytical thinking, too much logic, too many meanings! Life has no logic, so why does there have to be logic to explain what it means? Also, what is logic? I think I may need to break away from analytical thinking; this is the cause of all my anxieties."

"Indeed, loft aspirations produce ideas."

"Some distance away is a white azalea bush which stuns me with its stately beauty.____ This is pristine natural beauty. it is irrepressible, seeks no reward, and is without goal, a beauty derived neither from symbolism nor metaphor and needing neither analogies nor associations."

"Grandfather, when you saw the tiger were you scared? Bad people scare me, not tigers. Grandfather, have you ever run into bad people? There aren’t many tigers but lots of bad people, only you can’t shoot people."

"A good man never fights with a woman."

"They say it only takes an instant to have a dream; a dream can be compressed into hardtack."

"I came to the riverbank. The sand underfoot crunches and sounds like my grandmother sighing. She is fond of chattering endlessly, although no-one understands her. If you ask, Grandmother, what did you say? She will look up absentmindedly and, after a while, say, oh, you’re back from school? Are you hungry? There are sweet potatoes in the bamboo steamer. When she chatters it is best not to interrupt; she is talking about when she was a young woman. But if you eavesdrop from behind her chair, she seems to be saying. It’s hidden, it’s hidden, everything is hidden, everything… All these memories are making noises in the sand under your feet."

"The sand murmurs that it wants to swallow everything."

"She says she doesn’t know what to do! But he says coldly that he knows what he wants to do, but he can’t."

"I hadn't originally intended to do any reading, what if I did read one book more or one book less, whether I read or not wouldn't make a difference, I would still be waiting to get cremated."

"When God talks to humans he doesn’t want humans to hear his voice."

"The creature known as man is of course highly intelligent, he's capable of manufacturing almost anything from rumours to test-tube babies and yet he destroys two to three species every day. This is the absurdity of man."

"It takes a full sixty years for the Cold Arrow Bamboo to go through the cycle of flowering, seeding, dying and for the seeds to sprout, grow, and flower. According to Buddhist teachings on transmigration this would be exactly one kalpa. "Man follows earth, earth follows sky, sky follows the way, the way follows nature, don’t commit actions which go against the basic character of nature, don’t commit acts which should not be committed." "Then what scientific value is there in saving the giant panda?" I ask. "It’s symbolic, it’s a sort of reassurance―people need to deceive themselves. We are preoccupied with saving a species which no longer has the capacity for survival and yet on the other hand we’re changing ahead and destroying the very environment for the survival of the human species itself.""

"Realty exists only through experience, and it must be personal experience."

"Body odour (known also as scent of the immortals) is a disgusting condition with an awful, nauseating smell."

"The writer is an ordinary man, not a spokesman for the people, and that literature can only be the voice of one individual. Writing that becomes an ode to a country, the standard of a nation, the voice of a party... loses its nature—it is no longer literature. Writers do not set out to be published, but to know themselves. Although Kafka or Pessoa resorted to language, it was not in order to change the world. I, myself, believe in what I call cold literature: a literature of flight for one's life, a literature that is not utilitarian, but a spiritual self-preservation in order to avoid being stifled by society. I believe in a literature of the moment, for the living. You have to know how to use freedom. If you use it in exchange for something else, it vanishes."

"I want to write a novel so profound that it would suffocate a fly."

"Talking is not enough; words don’t clarify anything. I’ll have to hit upon something, but what?"

"I am sick of atrocities, though these are now the natural order of our world. And I would still like to act!"

"But there are times when being happy — just happy, nothing else — is simply vile." "Why?" Jill inquired. "Because," Enrique reasoned, "one cant be happy in a place where everybody is unhappy."

"I took a stroll in the city. It was infernally hot. The usual evening hubbub around me. Lovers on the pavements, hurrying to cinemas and other places of amusement as if nothing had happened, nothing. Living their nonexistent lives. Or do they exit, and it’s me who doesn’t."

"Nonexistence. The society of the nonexistent. In the street yesterday a nonexistent person trod on my foot with his nonexistent foot."

"Of course, living is another way of killing oneself: its drawback is that it takes so horribly long."

""You mustn’t forget about your future, Enrique." "I’m living for the present, Dad." "Ah!" he waved that aside. "The present is just temporary." ‘ I boiled up. "I know," I burst out. ‘It only has to be accepted temporarily — temporarily, but every day afresh. And every day ever more. Temporarily. Until we have lived to the end of our temporary lives, and one fine day we temporarily die."

"Only from our stories can we discover that our stories have come to an end, otherwise we would go on living as if there were still something for us to continue (our stories, for example); that is, we would go on living in error."

"Survivors represent a separate species, just like an animal species. We are all survivors, that is what determines our perverse and degenerate mental world. Auschwitz."

"Writers complete their works, whether those be thousands of pages long or just a few laconic lines."

"Good can be done in a life in which Evil is the life principle, but only at the cost of the doer’s sacrificing his life."

"Man, when reduced to nothing, or in other words a survivor, is not tragic but comic, because he has no fate."

"If you’re a revolutionary, you shouldn’t have started a family."

"I exist. Is this a life still? No, just vegetating. It seems that only one philosophy can succeed the philosophy of existentialism: nonexistentialism, the philosophy of nonexistent existence."

"If a person resolves to fight, he ought to know what he is fighting for. Otherwise it makes no sense. A person usually fights against a power in order to gain power himself. Or else because the power in question is threatening his life."

"The régime was overthrown, and I'm not going to pretend it was me who overthrew it. A general liquidation is in full swing, and I'm not going to join in. I've become a spectator. And I'm not even spectating from the front rows in the stalls but from somewhere up in the gods. Maybe I'm worn out, but it could be that I never truly believed in what I believed. That would be the unseemlier alternative, because then they would have smashed my ear in for no reason at all. That is the assumption I'm inclining to these days. (He breaks off and ponders, book in hand.) I did time for no reason, dragged the millstone of a police record around for no reason, was on probation for years for no reason, and I'm no hero, I merely botched up my life."