Richard Lloyd Parry > Quotes

“Tapi, Indonesia menyimpan terlalu banyak rahasia. Dan keanekaragamannya pun amat kelewatan...”
― Richard Lloyd Parry, In the Time of Madness: Indonesia on the Edge of Chaos

“I asked him what kind of consolation a priest could offer to people such as the parents of Okawa school, and he was quiet for a moment. “You have to be careful,” he said. “You have to be very careful in doing this to people who have lost their children. It takes long months, long years—it might take a whole lifetime. It might be the very last thing that you say to someone. But perhaps all that we can tell them in the end is to accept. The task of acceptance is very hard. It’s up to every single person, individually. People of religion can play only a part in achieving that—they need the support of everyone around them. We watch them, watch over them. We remember our place in the cosmos, as we work. We stay with them, and we walk together. That’s all we can do.”
― Richard Lloyd Parry, Ghosts of the Tsunami: Death and Life in Japan's Disaster Zone

“Most of the parents who came to the school were full-time mothers and housewives; most of the villagers offering their opinions were retired, elderly and male. It was another enactment of the ancient dialogue, its lines written centuries ago, between the entreating voices of women, and the oblivious, overbearing dismissiveness of old men.”
― Richard Lloyd Parry, Ghosts of the Tsunami: Death and Life in Japan's Disaster Zone

“He said, “We realized that, for all that we had learned about religious ritual and language, none of it was effective in facing what we saw all around us. This destruction that we were living inside—it couldn’t be framed by the principles and theories of religion. Even as priests, we were close to the fear that people express when they say, ‘We see no God, we see no Buddha here.’ I realized then that religious language was an armor that we wore to protect ourselves, and that the only way forward was to take it off.”
― Richard Lloyd Parry, Ghosts of the Tsunami: Death and Life in Japan's Disaster Zone

“Kaneta said, “What determined life or death? No Buddhist priest knows, no Christian pastor—not even the Pope in Rome. So I would say, ‘There’s one thing I can tell you, and that is that you are alive, and so am I. This is a certainty. And if we are alive, then there must be some meaning to it. So let’s think about it, and keep thinking about it. I’ll be with you as we think. I’ll stay with you, and we will do it together.’ Perhaps it sounds glib. But that is what I could say.”
― Richard Lloyd Parry, Ghosts of the Tsunami: Death and Life in Japan's Disaster Zone

“Sebagai republik yang merdeka, Indonesia berusia lima puluh tahun, tetapi kedengaran lebih mirip sebuah kekaisaran tak terkendali daripada sebuah negara bangsa modern.”
― Richard Lloyd Parry, In the Time of Madness: Indonesia on the Edge of Chaos

“It is easy to imagine grief as an ennobling, purifying emotion—uncluttering the mind of what is petty and transient, and illuminating the essential. In reality, of course, grief doesn’t resolve anything, any more than a blow to the head or a devastating illness. It compounds stress and complication. It multiplies anxiety and tension. It opens fissures into cracks, and cracks into gaping chasms.”
― Richard Lloyd Parry, Ghosts of the Tsunami: Death and Life in Japan's Disaster Zone

“The true mystery of Okawa school was the one we all face. No mind can encompass it; consciousness recoils in panic. The idea of conspiracy is what we supply to make sense of what will never be sensible— the fiery fact of death. Extinction of life: extinction of a perfect, a beloved child: for eternity. Impossible! the soul cries out. What are they hiding?”
― Richard Lloyd Parry, Ghosts of the Tsunami: Death and Life in Japan's Disaster Zone

“At a refugee community in Onagawa, an old neighbor would appear in the living rooms of the temporary houses and sit down for a cup of tea with their startled occupants. No one had the heart to tell her that she was dead; the cushion on which she had sat was wet with seawater.”
― Richard Lloyd Parry, Ghosts of the Tsunami: Death and Life in Japan's Disaster Zone

“The universe wraps everything up inside it, in the end,” Kaneta said. “Life, death, grief, anger, sorrow, joy. There was no boundary, then, between the living and the dead. There was no boundary between the selves of the living. The thoughts and feelings of everyone who was there at that moment melted into one. That was the understanding I achieved at that time, and it was what made compassion possible, and love, in something like the Christian sense.”
― Richard Lloyd Parry, Ghosts of the Tsunami: Death and Life in Japan's Disaster Zone

“The most important thing of all is to stay supple and flexible,” he said. “The moment you will be most stiff is when you die—you never get stiffer than that. So you’ve got to sleep well, eat well, and keep moving.”
― Richard Lloyd Parry, Ghosts of the Tsunami: Death and Life in Japan's Disaster Zone

“Everything made by men will be destroyed by nature in the end. Mountains and river, the creations of nature -- they will remain. Everything human, that will go. We nee to reconsider the respect we give to nature.”
― Richard Lloyd Parry, Ghosts of the Tsunami: Death and Life in Japan's Disaster Zone

“Among them was a middle-aged man supported by two broken sticks. His legs were bent permanently beneath him by accident or disease, and it took him five minutes to cross the room, collect his ballot and shuffle into the booth in front of me. It was painful to watch; as he edged forward I became aware that my heart was racing. Finally - finally - the referendum really was under way. What would happen next? Could Eurico and Basilio have more support than I had assumed? How could the violence of the last seven months fail to have an effect? I should have looked away, but I watched, and saw the man on sticks painstakingly mark his cross in the lower of the two boxes, the one rejecting continuing association with Indonesia. Then he folded the paper, turned his legs around, and began walking slowly towards the ballot box.”
― Richard Lloyd Parry, In the Time of Madness: Indonesia on the Edge of Chaos

“low expectations are corrosive to a democratic system.”
― Richard Lloyd Parry, Ghosts of the Tsunami: Death and Life in Japan's Disaster Zone

“No photograph could describe the spectacle. Even television images failed to encompass the panoramic quality of the disaster, the sense within the plane of destruction of being surrounded by it on all sides, sometimes as far as the eye could see. “It was hell,” Hitomi said. “Everything had disappeared. It was as if an atomic bomb had fallen.” This comparison, for which many people reached, was not an exaggeration. Only two forces can inflict greater damage than a tsunami: collision with an asteroid or nuclear explosion. The scenes along four hundred miles of coast that morning resembled those of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945, but with water substituted for fire, mud for ash, the stink of fish and ooze for scorched wood and smoke.”
― Richard Lloyd Parry, Ghosts of the Tsunami: Death and Life in Japan's Disaster Zone

“And then something comes over you, and then suddenly it’s as if you lift off the planet, and you’re far above, looking down, and you’ve got to find this person, like the needle in the proverbial haystack. It’s very strange. I could never express what that felt like. The feeling when you’ve lost something- that’s bad enough. But when you’ve lost someone, it’s awful.”
― Richard Lloyd Parry, People Who Eat Darkness: The True Story of a Young Woman Who Vanished from the Streets of Tokyo—and the Evil That Swallowed Her Up

“Religious people all argue about whether these are really the spirits of the dead,” Kaneta told me. “I don’t get into it, because what matters is that people are seeing them, and in these circumstances, after this disaster, it is perfectly natural. So many died, and all at once. At home, at work, at school—the wave came in and they were gone. The dead had no time to prepare themselves. The people left behind had no time to say goodbye. Those who lost their families, and those who died—they have strong feelings of attachment. The dead are attached to the living, and those who have lost them are attached to the dead. It’s inevitable that there are ghosts.” He said: “So many people are having these experiences. It’s impossible to identify who and where they all are.”
― Richard Lloyd Parry, Ghosts of the Tsunami: Death and Life in Japan's Disaster Zone

“The earthquake is the thing that all humans face: the banal inevitability of death. We don’t know when it will come, but we know that it will. We take refuge in elaborate and ingenious precautions, but in the end they are all in vain. We think about it even when we are not thinking about it; after a while, it seems to define what we are. It comes most often for the old, but we feel it most cruelly when it also takes away the young.”
― Richard Lloyd Parry, Ghosts of the Tsunami: Death and Life in Japan's Disaster Zone

“A magnitude 9.2 earthquake,” he said. “When something that powerful occurs, the Earth moves on its axis. So many people, all over Tohoku, were looking up at the sky on that night, filled with intense feelings. And looking at the stars, I became aware of the universe, the infinite space all around and above us. I felt as if I was looking into the universe, and I was conscious of the earthquake as something that had taken place within that vast expanse of empty space. And I began to understand that this was all part of a whole. Something enormous had happened. But whatever it was, it was entirely natural; it had happened as one of the mechanisms of the universe. “It’s engraved in my mind: the pitiless snow, and the beautiful shining, starry sky, and all those countless dead bodies drifting onto the beach. Perhaps this sounds pretentious, but I realized that when I began my work, giving support to people whose lives had been destroyed, I had to attend to the hearts of human beings and their suffering and anguish. But I also”
― Richard Lloyd Parry, Ghosts of the Tsunami: Death and Life in Japan's Disaster Zone

“By attaching a label to extreme behavior—monstrous, psychopathic, “evil”—and placing its perpetrators in a category reassuringly apart from “good” people, we could all worry a bit less about the complexities of human nature and the extent to which we might all, at one time or other, behave callously or without remorse.”
― Richard Lloyd Parry, People Who Eat Darkness: The True Story of a Young Woman Who Vanished from the Streets of Tokyo—and the Evil That Swallowed Her Up

“The families of the missing are doubly burdened: first by the pain of their ordeal, and then by our expectations of them, expectations of a standard of behavior higher than we require of ourselves. As humans, we seek naturally to help fellow creatures in distress. But most of us, whether we are conscious of it or not, expect something back—the flattery of helplessness and of need.”
― Richard Lloyd Parry, People Who Eat Darkness: The True Story of a Young Woman Who Vanished from the Streets of Tokyo—and the Evil That Swallowed Her Up

“A fire station in Tagajo received calls to places where all the houses had been destroyed by the tsunami. The crews went out to the ruins anyway, prayed for the spirits of those who had died—and the ghostly calls ceased. A taxi in the city of Sendai picked up a sad-faced man who asked to be taken to an address that no longer existed. Halfway through the journey, the driver looked into his mirror to see that the rear seat was empty. He drove on anyway, stopped in front of the leveled foundations of a destroyed house, and politely opened the door to allow the invisible passenger out at his former home.”
― Richard Lloyd Parry, Ghosts of the Tsunami: Death and Life in Japan's Disaster Zone

“It is true that people can be “brought together” by catastrophe, and it is human to look to this as a consolation. But the balance of disaster is never positive. New human bonds were made after the tsunami, old ones became stronger; there were countless remarkable displays of selflessness and self-sacrifice. These we remember and celebrate. We turn away from what is also commonplace: the destruction of friendship and trust; neighbors at odds; the enmity of friends and relatives. A tsunami does to human connectedness the same thing that it does to roads, bridges, and homes. And in Okawa, and everywhere in the tsunami zone, people fell to quarreling and reproaches, and felt the bitterness of injustice and envy, and fell out of love.”
― Richard Lloyd Parry, Ghosts of the Tsunami: Death and Life in Japan's Disaster Zone

“Japanese gaman is not a philosophical concept. The conventional translations fail to convey the passivity and abnegation that the idea contains, the extent to which gaman often seems indistinguishable from a collective lack of self-esteem. Gaman was the force that united the reeling refugees in the early days after the disaster; but it was also what neutered politics, and permitted the Japanese to feel that they had no individual power over and no responsibility for their national plight.”
― Richard Lloyd Parry, Ghosts of the Tsunami: Death and Life in Japan's Disaster Zone

“One of the judges, a plump, rather young man who sat on the chief judge’s right, spent much of the trial with his eyes closed: whether he was concentrating profoundly, or simply asleep, it was difficult to tell.”
― Richard Lloyd Parry, People Who Eat Darkness: Love, Grief and a Journey into Japan’s Shadows

“If you don’t have a strong family background, and you don’t have self-esteem, it’s almost a liability to be that good-looking,’ Annette said. ‘It’s difficult to stand up for yourself. You get preyed on.”
― Richard Lloyd Parry, People Who Eat Darkness: Love, Grief and a Journey into Japan’s Shadows

“Later on, I read the end of the New Order described as being 'like sex without orgasm'. It was an unmomentous a historic moment as could be imagined - perfunctory, anti-climactic and unconvincing.”
― Richard Lloyd Parry

“The hostess club was both leisure and work; in colonising the salaryman’s after-office hours, as well as the working day, the company ensured that his first loyalty was not to his family, but to his job. ‘They are tired when they arrive and the last thing they want to do is flog their wits to entertain either a client or a woman,’ wrote Professor Allison. ‘The hostess solves that problem. She entertains the client, flatters the man who is paying, and makes him look important and influential in front of others . . . If that same man went to a disco, he would probably fail to pick up a woman and go home feeling deflated and rejected. The hostess clubs remove the risk of failure.”
― Richard Lloyd Parry, People Who Eat Darkness: Love, Grief and a Journey into Japan’s Shadows

“A buckled car protruded from the window of one of the upper classrooms.”
― Richard Lloyd Parry, Ghosts of the Tsunami: Death and Life in Japan's Disaster Zone

“There may indeed have been an order from the top, but when the time came nothing so direct as an order would have been necessary. Everything had been laid so carefully in place, responsibility had already been dispersed across so many different departments, commands and individuals, that no words were necessary. Jakarta's silence was the command. In Timor, the army knew what to do and once the thing had started it gathered speed and power and continued until it had exhausted itself. This was the strangest and most fearful aspect of the violence in East Timor: that it could be so meticulous and methodical, and at the same time so completely out of control.”
― Richard Lloyd Parry, In the Time of Madness: Indonesia on the Edge of Chaos