Kenzaburō Ōe > Quotes

“The dead can survive as part of the lives of those that still live.”
― Kenzaburō Ōe, Hiroshima Notes

“Understanding comes hard to persons of high rank who are accustomed to phony lifestyles that involve no daily work.”
― Kenzaburō Ōe, Hiroshima Notes

“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.”
― Kenzaburō Ōe, Hiroshima Notes

“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.”
― Kenzaburō Ōe, A Personal Matter

“…I kept trying to run away. And I almost did. But it seems that reality compels you to live properly when you live in the real world.”
― Kenzaburō Ōe, A Personal Matter

“In this age of ours it's hard to say with certainty that having lived was better than not having been born in the first place.”
― Kenzaburō Ōe, A Personal Matter

“More often than not he finds what he is looking for, and it destroys him.”
― Kenzaburō Ōe, A Personal Matter

“If any suffering was fruitless it was the agony of a hangover; what he suffered now could not expiate suffering of any other kind.”
― Kenzaburo Oe

“We are much too tolerant of the moral aberration of statesmen and bureaucrats.”
― Kenzaburō Ōe

“It's a little bit like what Akari said to his grandmother in Shikoku, during her final illness: 'Please cheer up and die!”
― Kenzaburō Ōe, The Changeling

“Hiroshima is like a nakedly exposed wound inflicted on all mankind.”
― Kenzaburō Ōe, Hiroshima Notes

“Right now you're about the least attractive Bird I've ever seen...But I'll sleep with you just the same. I haven't been fastidious about morality since my husband committed suicide; besides, even if you intend to have the most disgusting kind of sex with me, I'm sure I'll discover something genuine in no matter what we do.”
― Kenzaburō Ōe, A Personal Matter

“Bird’s mother-in-law sat quite still, the world’s most forlorn ventriloquist.”
― Kenzaburō Ōe, A Personal Matter

“If I'm a monster then I want to be a real monster. I'll become a monster and explode.”
― Kenzaburō Ōe

“The fear of blindness created a moment's vacuum, serving as a relaxant for my exhausted and overheated brain.”
― Kenzaburō Ōe, The Silent Cry

“Once a person has been poisoned by self-deception, he can't make decisions about himself as neatly as all that.”
― Kenzaburō Ōe, A Personal Matter

“You’re right about this being limited to me, it’s entirely a personal matter. But with some personal experiences that lead you way into a cave all by yourself, you must eventually come to a side tunnel or something opens on a truth that concerns not just yourself but everyone. And with that kind of experience at least the individual is rewarded for his suffering. Like Tom Sawyer! He had to suffer in a pitch-black cave, but at the same time he found his way out into the light he also found a bag of gold! But what I’m experiencing personally now is like digging a vertical mine shaft in isolation; it goes straight down to a hopeless depth and never opens on anybody else’s world. So I can sweat and suffer in that same dark cave and my personal experience won’t result in so much as a fragment of significance for anybody else. Hole-digging is all I’m doing, futile, shameful hole-digging; my Tom Sawyer is at the bottom of a desperately deep mine shaft and I wouldn’t be surprised if he went mad!”
― Kenzaburō Ōe, A Personal Matter

“Kafka, you know, wrote in a letter to his father, the only thing a parent can do for a child is to welcome it when it arrives.”
― Kenzaburō Ōe, A Personal Matter

“The people of Hiroshima went to work at once to restore human society in the aftermath of the great atomic flood. They were concerned to salvage their own lives, but in the process they also salvaged the souls of the people who have brought the atomic bomb.”
― Kenzaburō Ōe, Hiroshima Notes

“We naturally try to forget our personal tragedies, serious or trifling, as soon as possible (even something as petty as being scorned or disdained by a stranger on a street corner). We try not to carry these things over to tomorrow. It is not strange, therefore, that the whole human race is trying to put Hiroshima, the extreme point of human tragedy, completely out of mind.”
― Kenzaburō Ōe, Hiroshima Notes

“I’m the one who’d like to send a telegram, AM RATHER IN TROUBLE—but addressed to whom?”
― Kenzaburō Ōe, A Personal Matter

“I wonder if it's suffering."
"What, our generation?"
"The baby!”
― Kenzaburō Ōe, A Personal Matter

“They gave the impression of unnaturally halted motion, like film caught in a projector.”
― Kenzaburō Ōe, A Personal Matter

“I thought about death and was gripped by feelings which choked my chest and made my throat dry, a sudden pushing and shoving in my guts. It was a sort of chronic ailment I had. Once that feeling and that agitation of my whole body had begun, I wouldn't be able to shake it off until I got to asleep. And I couldn't recall it with the same impact in the daytime.”
― Kenzaburō Ōe, Nip the Buds, Shoot the Kids

“In introducing himself, he had said, "I'm the father," and the doctors had winced. Because something else must have echoed in their ears- I'm the monster's father.”
― Kenzaburo Oe

“Bird, don't sound so crushed. The fact that I had never had sex before can only have been significant for me, if it had any meaning at all-it had nothing to do with you.”
― Kenzaburo Oe

“Anyway, I wasn’t asleep; if I nap during the day I can never get to sleep at night. I was thinking about the pluralistic universe.”
― Kenzaburō Ōe, A Personal Matter

“ Once a person has been poisoned by self-deception, he can't make decisions about himself as neatly as all that," Himiko said, elaborating her friend's terrific prophecy; " You won't get a divorce Bird. You'll justify yourself like crazy, and try to salvage your married life by confusing the real issues. A decision like divorce is beyond you now, Bird, the poison has gone to work. And you know how the story ends ? Not even your own wife will trust you absolutely, and one day you'll discover for yourself that your entire private life is in the shadow of deception and in the end you'll destroy yourself. Bird, the first signs of self-destruction have appeared already!"
" But that's a blind alley! Leave it to you to paint the most hopeless future you can think of. " Bird lunged at jocularity...”
― Kenzaburō Ōe, A Personal Matter

“Now I was just a transient in the valley, a one-eyed passerby too fat for his years, and life there had the power to summon up neither the memory nor the illusion of any other, truer self. As a passerby I had a right to insist on my identity.”
― Kenzaburō Ōe, The Silent Cry

“You’re still young, probably you haven’t lost sight of anything in this world that you can never forget, that’s so dear to you you’re aware of its absence all the time. Probably the sky a hundred yards or so above your head is still nothing more than sky to you. But all that means is that the storehouse happens to be empty at the moment.”
― Kenzaburō Ōe, Teach Us to Outgrow Our Madness