Kobo Abe Quotes

A crowd isn't formed after people gather; people gather after the crowd forms.

-Well, what happens with the River of Hades in the end?
-Not a thing. It's an infernal punishment precisely because nothing happens.

Only a shipwrecked person who has just escaped drowning could understand the psychology of someone who breaks out in laughter just because he is able to breathe

Injuries to the body, especially the face, are not treated simply as problems of form. We should rather speak of themas belonging in the province of mental hygiene. Otherwise, who whould willingly devote his efforts to cosmetic work?

Clinging to one's outward appearance interferes with living.

If animal history has been a history of evolution, then the history of mankind is one of retrogression. Hooray for monsters! Monsters are the great embodiments of the weak.

Without the threat of punishment, there is no joy in flight.

Inspecting? What do you mean? I don't understand. I'm collecting insects. My specialty is sand and insects.
What?
Collecting insects. Insects. Insects.I catch them like this!
Insects?

Of course, according to one theory a mask is apparently the expression of an extremely metaphysical aspiration to give oneself a kind of transcendental disguise, for the mask is not simply something compensatory.

It was perhaps relief and confidence stemming from the opportunity to tempt you into being my accomplice, however indirectly, in the lonely work of producing the mask. For me, whatever you may say, you are the most important "other person." No, I do not mean it in a negative sense. I meant that the one who must first restore the roadway, the one whose name I had to write on the first letter, was first on my list of "others." (Under any circumstances, I simply did not want to lose you. To lose you would be symbolic of losing the world.)

The goal does not lie in the results of research, the very process of research is itself the goal.

Life wouldn't be easier or not easier. Aren't both generalizations logically impossible? Since there's no correlation, there can be no comparison.

Something whose connection with human experience we cannot grasp is bound to be frightening.

Green makes me think of silence, or maybe it's loneliness. I get the feeling of a terribly distant star.

When I look at small things, I think I shall go on living: drops of rain, leather gloves shrunk by being wet ... When I look at something too big, I want to die: the Diet Building, or a map of the world ...

Everyone has his own philosophy that doesn't hold good for anybody else.

Only the happy ones return to contentment. Those who were sad return to despair.

His expression hardened. It was unpleasant to have feelings that he had been at pains to check aroused to no purpose

There are apparently two hypotheses about jealousy: that it is a product of civilization and that it is a basic instinct of animals.

The essential thing is the truth, not arguments or complaints.

It's a dangerous dog that doesn't bark.

Who could imagine that one could be so ridiculed, so humiliated by oneself?

I do not quite know how to put it, but I wonder if a mask, being universal, enhances our relations with others more than does the naked face.

The fish you don't catch is always the biggest.

The thorn of death falls from heaven, and its myriad forms leave us no room to move.

I rather think the world is like sand. The fundamental nature of sand is very difficult to grasp when you think of it in its stationary state. Sand not only flows, but this very flow is the sand.

… I only asked the mask to help me recover … I never once asked it to do things its own way.…

If one clung too closely to reality, the result might well be far from realistic.

This crazy, blind beating of wings caused by man-made light ... this irrational connection between spiders, moths and light. If a law appeared without reason, like this, what would one believe in?

Nothing is so awkward as a demonstration of humanity by the enemy.

The dial of the clock wears out unevenly;
Most worn
Is the area round eight.
As it is stared at with abrasive glances
unfailingly twice a day,
It is weathered away.
On the other side
The area at two
Is only half as worn,
For closed eyes at night
Pass without stopping.
If there is one who possesses a flat watch evenly worn,
It is he who, failing at the start, is running one lap behind.

Thus the world is always
A lap fast--
The world he thinks he sees
Has not yet begun.
Illusory time,
When the hands stand vertically on the dial;
Without the bell announcing the raising of the curtain,
The play has come to an end.

When will you ever accept the true ugliness of health?

I can hardly believe that the face is so important to a man's existence. A man's worth should be gauged by the content of his work; possibly the convolutions of the surface of the brain have something to do with it, but his face certainly does not. If the loss of a face can cause conspicuous change in the scale of evaluation, it may well be owing to a fundamental emptiness of content.

The minute you begin to have doubts, the floor under your feet starts to shake.

There wasn't a single item of importance [in the newspaper]. A tower of illusion, all of it, made of illusory bricks and full of holes. If life were made up only of imporant things, it really would be a dangerous house of glass, scarcely to be handled carelessly. But everyday life was exactly like the headlines. And so everybody, knowing the meaninglessness of existence, sets the centre of his compass at his own home.

What in heaven's name was the real essence of this beauty? Was it the precision of nature with its physical laws, or was it nature's mercilessness, ceaselessly resisting man's understanding?

In seeing there is love, in being seen there is abhorrence. One grins, trying to bear the pain of being seen. But not just anyone can be someone who only looks. If the one who is looked at looks back, then the person who was looking becomes the one who is looked at.

He wanted to believe that his own lack of movement had stopped all movement in the world, the way a hibernating frog abolishes winter.

Mankind, which has always been a part of nature, has reached a point where it is too much for nature to accommodate.

People like me who lack something are liable to become spiteful critics.

I wanted to get close to you, and at the same time to stay away from you. I wanted to know you, and at the same time I resisted that knowing. I wanted to look at you and at the same time felt ashamed to look. My state of suspension was such that the crevice between us grew deeper and deeper, and holding the broken glass together with my two hands, I barely preserved its form.

Loneliness was an unsatisfied thirst for illusion.

When I was young, I could bounce back from things like a brand-new rubber ball.

The world itself, like the mask, began to seem difficult to believe in, and I was stricken with an unutterable sense of loneliness.

Unable to suspect others, unable to believe in others, one would to live in a suspended state, a state of bankrupt human relations, as if one were looking into a mirror that reflects nothing.

It is manifestly pregnant and has a bulging white belly heavy with its load of kittens.

There are all kinds of life, and sometimes the other side of the hill looks greener. What's hardest for me is not knowing what living like this will ever come to.

It's a real handicap to have a face with shifty eyes.

I don't think there is any point in continuing writing. Since I have neither killed nor been killed, there's nothing further to explain. (Box Man, p. 38)

And so, one bit one's nails, unable to find contentment in the simple beating of one's heart ... one smoked, unable to be satisfied with the rhythm of one's brain ...

A naked body doing something is more completely naked than a simple nude.

Year after year students tumble along like the waters of a river. They flow away, and only the teacher is left behind, like some deeply buried rock at the bottom of the current.

I personally feel that a box, far from being a dead end, is an entrance to another world. I don't know to where, but an entrance to somewhere, some other world.

More than iron doors, more than walls, it is the tiny peephole that really makes the prisoner feel locked in

Still, the one who best understands the significance of light is not the electrician, not the painter, not the photographer, but the man who lost his sight in adulthood. There must be the wisdom of deficiency in deficiency, just as there is the wisdom of plenty in plenty.

Just as trees bear their fruit before winter, just as bamboo grass produces its seeds just before it withers, sex is simply a struggle with death on the human level.

The same sand currents had swallowed up and destroyed flourishing cities and great empires. They called it the "sabulation" of the Roman Empire, if he remembered rightly.

What we call beauty is perhaps the strength of our feeling of resistance to destructibility. Difficulty of reproduction is the yardstick of the degree of beauty.

Being free always involves being lonely.

If I were just in trousers, somehow I could go out into the world. It would make no difference whether I was naked from the waist up and my feet bare just as long as I had trousers on. Otherwise if you go walking around the streets without trousers, no matter how new your shoes and how elegant your coat, it's enough to raise a big hue and cry. Enlightened society is a kind of trouser society.

Loneliness - since I was trying to escape it - was hell; and yet for the hermit who seeks it, it is apparently happiness.

When a person is hurt the important thing isn't sympathy for the pain, but somebody to stop the bleeding, disinfect the wound, and sew it up. You have to treat the injured person not like a human being with a wound, but like a human wound. For a doctor who's used to such relationships, nothing is more maddening than a patient who acts like a goddam human being. To keep from arousing his doctor's anger, the patient tries to stop being human. The doctor becomes more and more alone, his nerves go on edge, and he drifts farther and farther from humanity. I guess you could even say a prejudice against patients is one requirement for a great doctor.

People listen to news only to feel reassured. Because however great the news of catastrophe they hear, those listening are still perfectly alive. The really big news is the ultimate news announcing the end of the world, I suppose. Of course, everybody wants to hear that. For then one does not need to abandon the world alone. When I think about it, I feel the reason that I was addicted was my eagerness not to miss this ultimate broadcast. But as long as the news goes on, it will never get to the end. Thus news constitutes the announcement that it is still not the end of the world. The following trifling clichés are merely abridgments.

You can only do what you can no matter how you try.

Suicide is an escape from life. What is life? An escape from death. This means that each of us must die twice. There is the death waiting us ahead, and the death that comes pursuing us from behind. Your trouble is that you're confused, Once you are free at least from the death that comes pursuing you, you can relax and enjoy life as you go along.

What we mean when we say "terrible conditions" is conditions which we are aware of as being terrible.

A plausible rumor / Seems a lot more believable / Than the truth itself.

Certainly sand was not suitable for life. Yet, was a stationary condition absolutely indispensable for existence? Didn't unpleasant competition arise precisely because one tried to cling to a fixed position? If one were to give up a fixed position and abandon oneself to the movement of the sands, competition would soon stop. Actually, in the deserts flowers bloomed and insects and other animals lived their lives. These creatures were able to escape competition through their great ability to adjust
for example, the man's beetle family.
While he mused on the effect of the flowing sands, he was seized from time to time by hallucinations in which he himself began to move with the flow.

Why did one have to put up a hue and cry about anything so trifling as the skin on one's face, which, after all, was only a small part of the human capsule?

Compared to the you in my heart, the I in you is insignificant.

Things have value Because somebody buys them, Because somebody pays money; If you can find a buyer, Even a lie is worth a thousand yen.

Defeat begins with the fear that one has lost.

Some people, when they're called before the police, like nothing better than to spill everything, fact and fiction alike, hoping to create a good impression.

Perhaps it would be better to say that, rather than losing their passion, they had frozen it by over-idealizing it.

But for some reason I have not yet become a fish. - The Box Man, p.36

It would seem that marsupials are poor imitations of full-fledged mammals. Their inadequacy gives them a certain appeal; we're touched by it.

The barrenness of sand, as it is usually pictured, was not caused by simple dryness, but apparently was due to the ceaseless movement that made it inhospitable to all living things. What a difference compared with the dreary way human beings clung together year in year out.

The torment of imprisonment lies in not being able to escape from oneself at any time.

And again, the dark street. The dark, dark street. The women out shopping for the evening meal of course, and baby carriage and the silver bicycle were already painted out by the darkness; most of the commuters too were already in place in their filing-drawer houses. A half-forsaken chasm of time ...

Lost in the crowd, it's all right to pretend for a moment to be no one.

Rather than run aimlessly away, it would be best, I suppose, to face the situation squarely and get used to it once and for all.

According to Fleetfin's research, if you sun-dry the sexual organs of a male and female squid and bring them into contact at the rate of three hundred fifty feet per fifteen seconds or less (the average running speed of a third-year junior high school student), you'll create an explosion surpassing dynamite.

Yet there seemed to be some truth in the law of probability, according to which the chance of success is directly proportionate to the number of repetitions.

Sand, which didn't even have a form of it's own. Yet, not a single thing could stand against this shapeless, destructive power. The very fact that it had no form was doubtless the highest manifestation of its strenght, was it not?

I want to spy on all sorts of places, and the box is a portable hole that occurred to me under the circumstances, it being impossible to punch holes throughout the world.