Julia > Julia's Quotes

“I feel so unhappy.”

I am sure that this one phrase whispered to me would arouse my sympathy more than the longest, most painstaking account of a woman’s life. It amazes and astonishes me that I have never once heard a woman make this simple statement. This woman did not say, “I feel so unhappy” in so many words, but something like a silent current of misery an inch wide flowed over the surface of her body. When I lay next to her my body was enveloped in her current, which mingled with my own harsher current of gloom like a “withered leaf settling to rest on the stones at the bottom of a pool.” I had freed myself from fear and uneasiness.”
― Osamu Dazai, No Longer Human

“Disqualified as a human being.”
― Osamu Dazai, No Longer Human

“My unhappiness stemmed entirely from my own vices, and I had no way of fighting anybody.”
― Osamu Dazai, No Longer Human

“It is true, I suppose, that nobody finds it exactly pleasant to be criticized or shouted at, but I see in the face of the human being raging at me a wild animal in its true colors, one more horrible than any lion, crocodile or dragon. People normally seem to be hiding this true nature, but an occasion will arise (as when an ox sedately ensconced in a grassy meadow suddenly lashes out with its tail to kill the horsefly on its flank) when anger makes them reveal in a flash human nature in all its horror.”
― Osamu Dazai, No Longer Human

“Disqualified as a human beings. I had now ceased utterly to be a human beings.”
― Osamu Dazai, No Longer Human

“Having said that, I must now admit that I was still afraid of human beings, and before I could meet even the customers in the bar I had to fortify myself by gulping down a glass of liquor. The desire to see frightening things—that was what drew me every night to the bar where, like the child who squeezes his pet all the harder when he actually fears it a little, I proclaimed to the customers standing at the bar my drunken, bungling theories of art.”
― Osamu Dazai, No Longer Human

“And I was incapable of living all by myself in those lodgings where I didn't know a soul. It terrified me to sit by myself quietly in my room. I felt frightened, as if I might be set upon or struck by someone at any moment.”
― Osamu Dazai, No Longer Human

“Even now it comes as a shock if by chance I notice in the street a face resembling someone I know however slightly, and I am at once seized by a shivering violent enough to make me dizzy.”
― Osamu Dazai, No Longer Human

“My eyes would swim in my head, and the whole world grow dark before me, so that I felt half out of my mind.”
― Osamu Dazai, No Longer Human

“Human beings never submit to human beings.”
― Osamu Dazai, No Longer Human

“The "world," after all, was still a place of bottomless horror.”
― Osamu Dazai, No Longer Human

“Actions punishable by jail sentences are not the only crimes. If we knew the antonym of crime, I think we would know its true nature. God . . . salvation . . . love . . . light. But for God there is the antonym Satan, for salvation there is perdition, for love there is hate, for light there is darkness, for good, evil. Crime and prayer? Crime and repentance? Crime and confession? Crime and ... no, they’re all synonymous. What is the opposite of crime?”
― Osamu Dazai, No Longer Human

“During the course of my life I have wished innumerable times that I might meet with a violent death, but I have never once desired to kill anybody. I thought that in killing a dreaded adversary I might actually be bringing him happiness.”
― Osamu Dazai, No Longer Human

“Love flies out the window when poverty comes in the door, they say, and it’s true.”
― Osamu Dazai, No Longer Human

“I was born in a village in the northeast, and it wasn’t until I was quite big that I saw my first train. I climbed up and down the station bridge, quite unaware that its function was to permit people to cross from one track to another. I was convinced that the bridge had been provided to lend an exotic touch and to make the station premises a place of pleasant diversity, like some foreign playground. I remained under this delusion for quite a long time, and it was for me a very refined amusement indeed to climb up and down the bridge. I thought that it was one of the most elegant services provided by the railways. When later I discovered that the bridge was nothing more than a utilitarian device, I lost all interest in it.
Again, when as a child I saw photographs of subway trains in picture books, it never occurred to me that they had been invented out of practical necessity; I could only suppose that riding underground instead of on the surface must be a novel and delightful pastime.
I have been sickly ever since I was a child and have frequently been confined to bed. How often as I lay there I used to think what uninspired decorations sheets and pillow cases make. It wasn’t until I was about twenty that I realized that they actually served a practical purpose, and this revelation of human dullness stirred dark depression in me.”
― Osamu Dazai, No Longer Human

“それは、自分の、人間に対する最後の求愛でした”
― Osamu Dazai, No Longer Human

“As long as I can make them laugh, it doesn’t matter how, I’ll be all right. If I succeed in that, the human beings probably won’t mind it too much I remain outside their lives.”
― Osamu Dazai, No Longer Human

“Unhappiness. There are all kinds of unhappy people in the world. I suppose it would be no exaggeration to say that the world is composed entirely of unhappy people. But those people can fight their unhappiness with society fairly and squarly, and society for its part easily understands and sympathizes with such struggles.”
― Osamu Dazai, No Longer Human

“I have tried insofar as possible to avoid getting involved in the sordid complications of human beings. I have been afraid of being sucked down into their bottomless whirlpool.”
― Osamu Dazai, No Longer Human

“Nothing was so hard for me to understand, so baffling, and at the same time so filled with menacing overtones as the commonplace remark, “Human beings work to earn their bread, for if they don’t eat, they die.”
― Osamu Dazai, No Longer Human

“There are some people whose dread of human beings is so morbid that they reach a point where they yearn to see with their own eyes monsters of ever more horrible shapes.”
― Osamu Dazai, No Longer Human

“God, I ask you. Is trustfulness a sin?”
― Osamu Dazai, No Longer Human