Tobi ﾄﾋﾞ

“Speech blossoms from anxiety… words were fermented from the uncertainty of existence, like poisonous red mushrooms sprout from the rotting earth. It’s true we have words of joy and pleasure, but aren’t those the most unnatural and contrived of them all? Apparently, human beings experience anxiety even in the midst of joy. But in a place without anxiety, there’s no need for such ignoble contrivances.”
― Osamu Dazai, Urashima san

“I’m afraid I don’t really have a clear understanding of the psychology of the powerful- particularly the absolutely invincible variety, which I’ve never met or known to exist. I’m a story writer with such feeble imaginative powers that unless I myself have experienced something, I can’t write one line- I can’t write a word- about it.”
― Osamu Dazai, Otogizōshi: The Fairy Tale Book of Dazai Osamu

“Shall I have to go there ten years hence to keep my old bones warm against the rheumatism and to scorch my bald pate in the heat of the noonday sun?
Shall I die without having seen anything?”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, Letters And Reminiscences

“Crime and punishment grow out of one stem. Punishment is a fruit that unsuspected ripens within the flower of the pleasure which concealed it. Cause and effect, means and ends, seed and fruit, cannot be severed; for the effect already blooms in the cause, the end preexists in the means, the fruit in the seed.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self-Reliance: An Excerpt from Collected Essays, First Series