Aneka Japanese Quotes

Renga with Katie


There's no better place
Than in each moment with you
Traveling through life

Regardless of place and time,
Or seasons and location,

I never look back
To a time without you there
And wish to return

We are each other's constant
In an ever changing world





On a pilgrimage
To no place particular,
Destinationless

Each moment we're arriving
At another sacred place

Appreciating,
Remembering life before
You opened my eyes

It's both vivid and soothing
Like I'd never had vision

Now I see the way,
As we travel together
The fog is lifted

Each sight reveals each other
Each step reveals another ~ Eric Overby

The Japanese say, If the flower is to be beautiful, it must be cultivated. ~ Lester Cole

Should a black woman carrying her "madam's" white baby travel in the "whites only" or the "nonwhites" section of the train? Or would a Japanese visitor who used a "whites only" public toilet be breaking the law? Or what was a bus conductor to do when he ordered a brown-skinned passanger to get off a whites-only bus and the passanger refused, insisting that he was a white man with a deep suntan? ~ John Carlin

Tantric Zen is for someone who is really broad-minded. It is Bodhidharma's Zen, your Zen, my Zen. Which doesn't mean I have a problem with Japanese Zen. Most Japanese Zen is minding your p's and q's. ~ Frederick Lenz

When you're a model, you learn how to make the most of your assets - in my case, the smallish behind that is the legacy of my half-Japanese heritage. ~ Marie Helvin

I grew up as a fifth-generation Jew in the American South, at the confluence of two great storytelling traditions. After graduating from Yale in the 1980s, I moved to Japan. For young adventure seekers like myself, the white-hot Japanese miracle held a similar appeal as Russia in 1920s or Paris in the 1950s. ~ Bruce Feiler

There are few gardens that can be left alone. A few years of neglect and only the skeleton of a garden can be traced ... Japanese artists working with a few stones and sand four hundred years ago achieved strangely lasting compositions. However there, too, but for the hands that have piously raked the white sand into patterns and controlled the spread of moss and lichens, little would remain. ~ Russell Page

Well, your God is silent and sleeping while the Japanese are busy torturing and killing us Koreans. We are as helpless as flies and it is getting worse as the war goes on. ~ Sook Nyul Choi

If Japanese companies don't reform drastically and implement English as their daily business language, the economy will only continue to contract. ~ Shuji Nakamura

Here's the irony in what I do: When I go out to eat, I like classic French food. I like amazing Japanese food that has such a history that it goes back hundreds of years. And I also like really innovative food as well. ~ Grant Achatz

Although the defects of the Russian Army were notorious, although the Russian winter, not the Russian Army, had turned Napoleon back from Moscow, although it had been defeated on its own soil by the French and British in the Crimea, although the Turks in 1877 had outfought it at the siege of Plevna and only succumbed later to overwhelming numbers, although the Japanese had outfought it in Manchuria, a myth of its invincibility prevailed. ~ Barbara W. Tuchman

Now, just to understand better what's going on, let's imagine the shoe on the other foot. Let's imagine that hundreds of thousands of badly-educated Americans, white Americans, were pouring across the boarder into Mexico. And let's imagine that they were insisting on instruction in school in English rather than Spanish. Let's imagine they were asking for ballot papers in English rather than Spanish, they were celebrating Fourth of July rather than Sinco de Mayo, buying up newspapers, publishing in English, television stations, radios, all publishing and broadcasting in English ,and that there were so many of them coming in that they threatened to reduce Mexicans to minority. Do you think the Mexicans could possibly be tricked into thinking that this was enrichment, this was diversity, that this was great? No. No. They wouldn't stand for it for a moment. This would be to them an impossible unacceptable invasion of their country. And you would find the same reaction in any non-white country anywhere in the world. Can you imagine say, the Japanese or the Nigerians, the Pakistanis, the Costa Ricans accepting this kind of wholesale demographic change that would change their country, transform their country, and reduce them to a minority? No. These things are impossible to imagine. ~ Jared Taylor

As much as any contemporary writer, Murakami grasps the bewildering fluidity of commoditized life. ~ Japan Foundation

Two different kinds of Japanese psychotherapies, one based on getting people to stop using feelings as an excuse for their actions and the other based on getting people to practice gratitude. ~ Will Schwalbe

However keen you may be to begin your study, before you venture on to the mat and attempt any of the basic techniques it is necessary to know something of the principles that govern aikido, for unless you do understand a little about posture, movement, balance, gentleness and courtesy, you will not be a satisfactory pupil.

(Page 18). ~ Sadami Yamada

I've been working with Spanish, French, some more American, and Japanese directors. And then I realized I have to study English, and that's why I moved to New York two years ago. ~ Rinko Kikuchi

I look at my grandparents and what they dealt with in the Japanese internment in Arizona. That sense of perseverance, of making the best out of an incredibly bad situation, has always been something I drew inspiration from. I always ask myself, 'What in the world do I have to complain about?' ~ Scott Fujita

I think the future stopped looking American when you think back to Blade Runner and Neuromancer, when it started to look more Japanese. ~ Iain Banks

I look like I'm Chinese or Thai or Japanese - very different. ~ Mary Kom

From then on, my thesis hung over me like a curse, and with bloodshot eyes, I worked like a madman. ~ Soseki Natsume

There's a reason that there are oodles of young Aussies, Germans, Japanese, even Chinese backpackers traipsing around the world. They are unencumbered by debilitating student loans. No such luck for the American Theater Arts major with $120,000 in loans. ~ J. Maarten Troost

Be as vigilantly on guard against translating such a sentence into the passive voice as you would against committing murder. ~ Jay Rubin

My mother lived in Holland, and during World War II was incarcerated in a Japanese camp for three years. ~ Jane Seymour

Christ said "Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself" and when asked "who is thy neighbour? went on to the parable of the Good Samaritan. If you wish to understand this parable as it was understood by his hearers, you should substitute "Germans and Japanese" for Samaritan. I fear my modern day Christians would resent such a substitution, because it would compel them to realize how far they have departed from the teachings of the founder of their religion. ~ Bertrand Russell

I've been lucky: my Japanese genes - from my mother's side - and a lifelong moisturising routine have helped keep me looking good. ~ Marie Helvin

The best way to learn Japanese is to be born as a Japanese baby, in Japan, raised by a Japanese family. ~ Dave Barry

The anti-Japanese resistance was as familiar a theme in North Korean cinema as cowboys and Indians was in early Hollywood. ~ Barbara Demick

What alternative is there to the media's "Us" versus "Them"? The danger is that if it is used to prop up this "righteous" position of "ours" all we will see from now on are ever more exacting and minute analyses of the "dirty" distortions in "their" thinking. Without some flexibility in our definitions we'll remain forever stuck with the same old knee-jerk reactions, or worse, slide into complete apathy. ~ Haruki Murakami

Gardeners may create order briefly out of chaos, but nature always gets the last word, and what it says is usually untidy by human standards. But I find all states of nature beautiful, and because I want to delight in my garden, not rule it, I just accept my yen to tame the chaos on one day and let the Japanese beetles run riot on the next. ~ Diane Ackerman

Hey, I got an idea, let's go to the movies. I wanna go to the movies, I want to take you all to the movies. Let's go and experience the art of the cinema. Let's begin with the Scream Of Fear, and we're gonna have it haunt us for the rest of our lives. And then let's go see The Great Escape, and spend our summer jumping our bikes, just like Steve McQueen over barb wire. And then let's catch The Seven Samurai for some reason on PBS, and we'll feel like we speak Japanese because we can read the subtitles and hear the language at the same time. And then let's lose sleep the night before we see 2001: A Space Odyssey because we have this idea that it's going to change forever the way we look at films. And then let's go see it four times in one year. And let's see Woodstock three times in one year and let's see Taxi Driver twice in one week. And let's see Close Encounters of the Third Kind just so we can freeze there in mid-popcorn. And when the kids are old enough, let's sit them together on the sofa and screen City Lights and Stage Coach and The Best Years of Our Lives and On The Waterfront and Midnight Cowboy and Five Easy Pieces and The Last Picture Show and Raging Bull and Schindler's List… so that they can understand how the human condition can be captured by this amalgam of light and sound and literature we call the cinema. ~ Tom Hanks

... Her desire was close to that of the person who drowns himself; he does not necessarily covet death so much as what comes after the drowning - something different from what he had before, at least a different world. ~ Yukio Mishima

Most Americans, like most Japanese, view their dogs, cats, and other animal companions as family members, and rightly so. ~ Ingrid Newkirk

The President regards the Japanese as a brave people; but courage, though useful in time of war, is subordinate to knowledge of arts; hence, courage without such knowledge is not to be highly esteemed. ~ Townsend Harris

Some of the gardeners, Nanao said, worked according to the precepts of Muso Soseki, others according to other Japanese Zen masters; others still to Fu Hsi, the legendary inventor of the Chinese system of geomancy called feng shui; others to Persian gardening gurus, including Omar Khayyam; or to Leopold or Jackson, or other early American ecologists, like the nearly forgotten biologist Oskar Schnelling; and so on. These ~ Kim Stanley Robinson