Jay Rubin > Quotes

“Be as vigilantly on guard against translating such a sentence into the passive voice as you would against committing murder.”
― Jay Rubin, Making Sense of Japanese: What the Textbooks Don't Tell You

“Sorrow never heals. We simply take comfort in the fact that our pain seems to fade.”
― Jay Rubin, The Penguin Book of Japanese Short Stories

“Had he lived longer, Akutagawa might have come to realize that he was far from alone.”
― Jay Rubin, Rashōmon and Seventeen Other Stories

“The bones came jumbled together from the kitchen... there was no way of telling my parents from my Brothers and Sisters. I put them all in the same urn. Sometimes, late at night, I hold them in my hands and cry.”
― Jay Rubin, The Penguin Book of Japanese Short Stories

“Aus irgendeinem Grund ist das, was mich berührt, immer etwas, das ich nicht verstanden habe.”
― Jay Rubin, Haruki Murakami and the Music of Words

“In 1970, nine years after he wrote ‘Patriotism’, Mishima died committing seppuku in a patriotic act of grieving for the fate of his nation. I was twenty-one years old at the time, watching the surrounding events on television in the university dining hall and wondering what I was seeing. Even after it finally dawned on me what this was about, I was unable to discover any urgent ‘meaning’ in Mishima’s act. If it taught me anything, it was that there existed a huge gulf between bringing an idea to a literary apotheosis and doing it as an act in the real world.”
― Jay Rubin, The Penguin Book of Japanese Short Stories

“Instead of pressuring the Japanese into lowering trade barriers or taking a greater share of the responsibility for their own defense, we should be urging them to bring their verbs from the ends of their sentences into second place, right after their subjects, where they belong.”
― Jay Rubin, Making Sense of Japanese: What the Textbooks Don't Tell You

“figures”
― Jay Rubin, The Penguin Book of Japanese Short Stories

“I’m from the New Electro Company,’ Zame mutters. ‘Buy this electric spider.”
― Jay Rubin, The Penguin Book of Japanese Short Stories

“According to the news, when you boiled water its concentration of radioactive particles increased. Starting tomorrow, I’d stop breastfeeding and give the baby formula made with tap water.”
― Jay Rubin, The Penguin Book of Japanese Short Stories

“I lived in an apartment with my husband, and with this blob that could only be called a baby,”
― Jay Rubin, The Penguin Book of Japanese Short Stories