Kōji Suzuki > Quotes

“The world doesn't hate you as much as you think it does.”
― Koji Suzuki, Birthday

“There was no more meaningless phrase in all of language than "Cheer up!" The only way to get someone to cheer up was to help them forget, and saying "cheer up" had quite the opposite effect, only reminding the person why he or she was depressed in the first place.”
― Koji Suzuki, Spiral

“Think! There's nothing certain in our future! All we can hope for is a vague continuation. But in spite of that, you're going to keep on living. You can't give up on life just because it's vague. It's a question of possibilities...”
― Koji Suzuki, Ring

“People can endure almost anything but there's one thing they can't survive. Man is an animal that can't stand boredom”
― Koji Suzuki, Spiral

“My life's been defined by my actions. I've shaped my destiny through my battles. I would rather keep chasing after my dreams until I crumble into dust than sit around waiting for fate to show me mercy.”
― Koji Suzuki, Paradise

“You must learn to look at things without preconceptions. Trust nothing.”
― Koji Suzuki, Loop

“Don't worry. There's nothing down there. Your biggest enemy is your imagination.”
― Kōji Suzuki, Ring

“I'm used to it. Try slamming your fist into a brick wall every day. Eventually you won't even feel the pain anymore.”
― Kōji Suzuki, Ring

“You know, a lot of strange things happen in this world.”
― Kōji Suzuki, Ring

“Of course, a story always begins with such a coincidence.”
― Kōji Suzuki, Ring

“But listen, devils never drive humanity to extinction. Why? Because if people cease to exist, so do devils.”
― Kōji Suzuki, Ring

“Asakawa himself didn't much care if the company made money or lost it. All that mattered to him was whether or not the work was engaging. No matter how easy a job was physically, if it didn't involve imagination, it usually ended up exhausting you.”
― Koji Suzuki, Ring

“A fundamental sense of terror is built into us humans, on the instinctual level.”
― Kōji Suzuki, Ring

“Reality and the virtual space reflect each other. They correspond to each other.”
― Koji Suzuki, Birthday

“But darkness, too, really existed, as light's opposite pole.”
― Kōji Suzuki, Ring

“modern science hasn’t managed to come up with answers to any of the most basic questions. How did life first appear on earth? How does evolution work? Is it a series of random events, or does it have a set teleological direction? There are all kinds of theories, but we haven’t been able to prove one of them. The structure of the atom is not a miniature of the solar system, it’s something much more difficult to grasp, full of what you might call latent power. And when we try to observe the subatomic world, we find that the mind of the observer comes into play in subtle ways. The mind, my friend! The very same mind which, ever since Descartes, proponents of the mechanistic view of the universe considered subordinate to the body-machine. And now we find that the mind influences observed results. So I give up. Nothing surprises me. I’m prepared to accept anything that happens in this world. I actually kind of envy people who can still believe in the omnipotence of modern science.”
― Koji Suzuki, Spiral

“Right. Mutation is the trigger that moves evolution forward. So, how do mutations happen?”
― Koji Suzuki, Spiral

“¿No te parece que una persona con genitales masculinos y femeninos es el
símbolo supremo de poder y de belleza?”
― Kōji Suzuki

“There are three conditions that have to be met in order for a malevolent will to remain in the world after death. An enclosed space, water, and a slow death. One, two, three. In other words, if someone dies slowly, in an enclosed space, with water present, then usually that person’s angry spirit will haunt the place. Now, look at this well. It’s a small, enclosed space. There’s water.”
― Kōji Suzuki, Ring

“See, we don’t know the beginning and we don’t know the end; all we can know about is the in-between stuff. And that, my friend, is what life is like.”
― Kōji Suzuki, Ring

“Life is the name of all things that have shells separating them from the outside, the ability to sustain and reproduce themselves, and the capacity to evolve.”
― Koji Suzuki, Edge

“What harm could come from just watching a videotape?”
― Kōji Suzuki, Ring

“Humanity as such, we might say, is a large collective drifting into the future with survival as its shared interest. This law differs from the “laws“ that we have written down, and that have such an inorganic connotation. This law exists hardly to reign in outpourings of human instinct, but rather, is aligned with the incohate impulses toward life esconced in our hearts; it is an unspoken agreement among human beings where there are more than one. In short, this naked law, fundamental to survival,was altered and institutionalized over many thousands of years of history before our laws came to be.”
― Koji Suzuki

“It’s all about differential equations. Most phenomena in the universe can be expressed with differential equations, you know. Using them, you can figure out what the universe looked like a hundred million years ago, ten billion years ago, even a second or a tenth of a second after that initial explosion. But. But. No matter how far we go back, no matter how we try to express it, we just can’t know what it looked like at zero, at the very moment of the explosion. And there’s another thing. How is our universe going to end? Is the universe expanding or contracting? See, we don’t know the beginning and we don’t know the end; all we can know about is the in-between stuff. And that, my friend, is what life is like.”
― Kōji Suzuki, Ring

“DNA was the chemical material on which hereditary information was recorded, while a gene was one unit of that nearly infinite amount of hereditary information.”
― Koji Suzuki, Spiral

“There was no more meaningless phrase in all of language than “Cheer up!”
― Koji Suzuki, Spiral

“Day after day they’d waited for Ryoji to be taken away for his tests. Then in the brilliant light of day Kaoru would lay Reiko down on the bed, hike up her skirt, pull down her panties, and examine her sex organ. It was no more than one organ of the many that made up her body, but he found it inexplicably fascinating. His love for her had endowed it with inestimable value.”
― Kōji Suzuki, Loop

“When a new object emerges that satisfies the same purpose as an older one, the older one falls into obsolescence.”
― Koji Suzuki, Edge

“If you took any two incidents, you could find things in common if you looked hard enough.”
― Kōji Suzuki, Ring

“Think! There's nothing certain in our future! All we can hope for is a vague continuation. But in spite of that, you're going to keep on living. You can't give up on life just because it's vague. It's a question of possibilities.”
― Kōji Suzuki, Ring