Yokomitsu Riichi > Quotes

“It's always worthless sort of person who puts himself out in order to get somebody else worked up.”
― Riichi Yokomitsu, Kikai

“Eyes are funny things, and when two people have been thinking at the same level of consciousness and their wandering gazes meet, they pierce right through to the back of each other's mind.”
― Riichi Yokomitsu, Kikai

“He always had to end things up like that, because she was sensitive to each motion of his face, to every half-shadow that might drift across it, and he needed to baffle and cancel out what she perceived there. Yet also there were times when this kind of response of hers would outwit him, suddenly slip through to where it hurt and completely unbalance him.”
― Yokomitsu Riichi

“As soon as people start to do anything, they are obliged to give themselves away.”
― Riichi Yokomitsu, Kikai

“But there was his mind going round and round in circles tied up to the bars of her cage, and here was her mind inside its mental cage, and this cage mentality of hers with all her physical irritability kept on at him all the time, hardly allowing him a moment to breathe.”
― Yokomitsu Riichi

“The waves after waves of suffering that came in upon him had never been something to be evaded. The origin of those waves of suffering, each different in each onslaught, existed in his very flesh, had been there from the beginning. He had decided to taste this suffering as the tongue tastes sugar, to scrutinize it with the total light of his senses. Which would taste best in the end? My body is a scientific flask; the most important thing is absolute clarity.”
― Yokomitsu Riichi

“Happiness exists because there are unfortunate people. Who are we to make the unfortunate happy?”
― Riichi Yokomitsu, Shanghai: A Novel by Yokomitsu Riichi (Volume 33)

“Miracles are not imposed upon us from outside; they are produced by our own poverty and ugliness of spirit.”
― Riichi Yokomitsu, Kikai