Tokyo Quotes

In this world, the strong devour the weak. Who is the strong? I am. I am the fucking strong. ~ Ken Kaneki

My first trip to Japan, in 1998, began with an enormous crowd of Japanese paparazzi and television crews, all waiting for me to clear customs in Tokyo (a first-time experience for this wine critic). Over the next five days, the attention never waned. ~ Robert M. Parker, Jr.

In Japan, the writers have made up a literary community, a circle, a society. I think 90 percent of Japan's writers live in Tokyo. Naturally, they make a community. There are groups and customs, and so they are tied up in a way. ~ Haruki Murakami

No, little boys are much wimpier than little girls. ~ Hiromi Kawakami

Look at London or Paris: they're both filthy. You don't get that in Tokyo. The proud residents look after their city. ~ Tadao Ando

We need to have a mask that we never take off. ~ Sui Ishida

Baby, your rhymes get me going. ~ Rick Remender

The first thing I did when I was forty years old, I put handcuffs on and I jumped off Alcatraz prison and swam to San Francisco handcuffed. That made national publicity. Then, there were three or four years where I would do more difficult feats. Another birthday I towed a thousand pound boat across the Golden Gate. On my 65th Birthday I towed 65 boats a mile and a half in Tokyo. On my 70th Birthday I towed 70 boats with 70 people in it with my feet and hands tied a mile and a half in Long Beach ... My next Birthday I will be 93. I'm gonna tow my wife across the bathtub. ~ Jack LaLanne

I went to Tokyo three years ago. It was a job, though. I did an ad campaign for IBM, so they flew me out there to take pictures of me. It was IBM Global. It went to Australia, France, London, all over the world. But I think the ad campaign was a failure, because of me. ~ Bobby Lee

A past President, bullied and sandbagged by a monkey posing as a newscaster, finally lashed back ... The nation's marketplace of ideas is being poisoned by a propaganda company so blatant that Tokyo Rose would've quit ... As with all the other nefariousness and slime of this, our worst presidency since James Buchanan, he [President Bush] is having it done for him, by proxy. Thus, the sandbag effort by Fox News Friday afternoon. ~ Keith Olbermann

Hence there are many things that governments, corporations and individuals can do to avoid climate change. But to be effective, they must be done on a global level. When it comes to climate, countries are just not sovereign. They are at the mercy of actions taken by people on the other side of the planet. The Republic of Kiribati – an islands nation in the Pacific Ocean – could reduce its greenhouse gas emissions to zero and nevertheless be submerged under the rising waves if other countries don't follow suit. Chad could put a solar panel on every roof in the country and yet become a barren desert due to the irresponsible environmental policies of distant foreigners. Even powerful nations such as China and Japan are not ecologically sovereign. To protect Shanghai, Hong Kong and Tokyo from destructive floods and typhoons, the Chinese and Japanese will have to convince the Russian and American governments to abandon their 'business as usual' approach. ~ Yuval Noah Harari

Shibuya is a trendy part of Tokyo where young people come to meet and have a good time. ~ Rebecca MacKinnon

Bill Clinton was for NAFTA. I heard him over in Tokyo he came out all said it was a great bill. Secretary Clinton was for it. She called it the gold standard when she was secretary of state. ~ Chris Matthews

Walking out of the store with my parrot & sushi, I feel hideous, like everything I've done must be written on my skin. I walk through the streets of Tokyo with my cameraman behind me, knowing that anyone who looks at me will be able to see myshame, my sorrow, my regrets as ugly as scars. -Cassie ~ Carolyn Parkhurst

If the Earth is the size of a pea in New York, then the Sun is a beachball 50m away, Pluto is 4km away, and the next nearest star is in Tokyo. Now shrink Pluto's orbit into a coffee cup; then our Milky Way Galaxy fills North America. ~ Wayne Hays

I'm just a broken thing you're familiar with. ~ Rick Remender

I always used to reach for the cigarette when the phone rang, and I figured nobody would ever call me in Tokyo. The time difference is so profound it's, like, already September in Tokyo, and I figured nobody would be able to work it out. ~ David Sedaris

New York has made me so paranoid, too. Whenever I visit another city, I always act like I'm from there, so the cab driver doesn't rip me off. I'm always like, "Yeah, it's good to be back home. Back here where I grew up. Yeah. Here in Tokyo ... Uh, driver, I need to go to my old stomping grounds. That would be the Holiday Inn. And the address appears to be the pound sign." ~ Jim Gaffigan

Enough rationalization. They simply had what you wanted, so you took it.

[My chair-- I shit on my good chair!]

You shit more than just your chair.

You shit the world. All you ever cared about was winning -- And you did.

The last man standing on a mountain of filth [. . .]

Kazumi taught forgiveness. She accepted all refugees looking for a better life. And you turned that against her.

Kazumi would show mercy.

I'm not Kazumi. ~ Rick Remender

I grew up in the countryside in Saitama prefecture, north of Tokyo. ~ Nobu Matsuhisa

I had an overwhelming sense of the lonliness of this city - a trillion souls in their bedrooms, high in the cliffs of windows. I thought of what was underneath it all - I thought of the electricty cables, steam, water, fire, subway trains and lava in the city's guts, the subterranean rumbling of trains and earthquakes. I thought of the dead souls from the war, concreted over. ~ Mo Hayder

Tokyo is too close up to see, sometimes. There are no distances and everything is above your head - dentists, kindergartens, dance studios. Even the roads and walkways are up on murky stilts. An evil-twin Venice with all the water drained away. ~ David Mitchell

When I think of Tokyo Story, yeah, it is like a novella. That doesn't mean it's not great. Some of my favorite Tolstoy works are his novellas. ~ Paul Auster

You're always unsteady, ready to slip at any moment. That's why everybody can't take their eyes off you. ~ Sui Ishida

Her eyes flashed, hot and angry, like lightening cutting through a red sunset. ~ Tyffani Clark Kemp

If you travel everywhere and find the same elements everywhere, somehow it reduces the value of the place (Curiosity, Tokyo, Japan) ~ Editorial Board Of Approaching Hotel Designers

In this manner , we are told, the system of the imaginary is spread circularly, by detours and returns the length of an empty subject. ~ Roland Barthes

Koizumi was not rooted in Japan's rightwing nationalist tradition: he was a pragmatist and a populist. Abe, in contrast, is a rightwing nationalist. Unlike Koizumi, for example, he has questioned the validity of the postwar Tokyo trials of Japan's wartime leaders, which found many of them guilty of war crimes. ~ Martin Jacques

I haven't had any adventures. Things have happened to me, events, incidents, anything you like. But not adventures. It isn't a matter of words; I am beginning to understand. There is something I longed for more than all the rest - without realizing it properly. It wasn't love, heaven forbid, nor glory, nor wealth. It was…anyway, I had imagined that at certain moments my life could take on a rare and precious quality. There was no need for extraordinary circumstances: all I asked for was a little order. There is nothing very splendid about my life at present: but now and then, for example when they played music in the cafés, I would l look back and say to myself: in the old days, in London, Meknés, Tokyo, I have known wonderful moments, I have had adventures. It is that which has been taken away from me now. I have just learnt, all of a sudden, for no apparent reason, that I have been lying to myself for ten years. Adventures are in books. And naturally, everything they tell you about in books can happen in real life, but not in the same way. It was to this way of happening that I attached so much importance. ~ Jean-Paul Sartre

Having completed its conquest of California in 1844, the United States looked across the Pacific for new business opportunities. In 1853, Commodore Matthew Perry sailed into Tokyo (then called Edo) Bay with four men-of-war, and handed over a letter for the Japanese emperor from the American president which began with the ominous words, 'You know that the United States of America now extend from sea to sea.' Denied an audience with the emperor, Perry retreated with subtle threats to return with more firepower if the Japanese did not agree to open their ports to American trade. They refused. He did as he said; and the Japanese succumbed. ~ Pankaj Mishra

In summer, most ramen restaurants in Tokyo serve hiyashi chūka, a cold ramen noodle salad topped with strips of ham, cucumber, and omelet; a tart sesame- or soy-based sauce; and sometimes other vegetables, like a tomato wedge or sheets of wakame seaweed. The vegetables are arranged in piles of parallel shreds radiating from the center to the edge of the plate like bicycle spokes, and you toss everything together before eating. It's bracing, ice-cold, addictive- summer food from the days before air conditioning.
In Oishinbo: Ramen and Gyōza, a young lifestyle reporter wants to write an article about hiyashi chūka. "I'm not interested in something like hiyashi chūka," says my alter ego Yamaoka. It's a fake Chinese dish made with cheap industrial ingredients, he explains.
Later, however, Yamaoka relents. "Cold noodles, cold soup, and cold toppings," he muses. "The idea of trying to make a good dish out of them is a valid one." Good point, jerk. He mills organic wheat into flour and hires a Chinese chef to make the noodles. He buys a farmyard chicken from an old woman to make the stock and seasons it with the finest Japanese vinegar, soy sauce, and sake. Yamaoka's mean old dad Kaibara Yūzan inevitably gets involved and makes an even better hiyashi chūka by substituting the finest Chinese vinegar, soy sauce, and rice wine.
When I first read this, I enjoyed trying to follow the heated argument over this dish I'd never even heard of. Yamaoka and Kaibara are in total a ~ Matthew Amster-Burton

The familiar sound of the kitchen knife, and the stove's smell, mom's back...
It feels like my life in Tokyo was
just
a dream. ~ Mika Yamamori

In the Crusades, getting the Holy Land back was the goal, and any means could be used to achieve it. World War II was a crusade. The firebombing of Tokyo by Doolittle and the carpet bombing in Germany, especially by the British, showed that. ~ Stanley Hauerwas

It's quieter here, isn't it.
Quieter than Tokyo anyway.
Do unpleasant things happen here also?
Well, after all this also is part of the world. ~ Ryunosuke Akutagawa

The wisdom that sleeps
In the written word
Is overcome by a despair
That lurks within ~ Sui Ishida

I lived for two years in Odawara, a castle town an hour outside of Tokyo, near the sea. It's a beautiful place, and I drew on my experiences there when writing 'The Lake of Dreams.' ~ Kim Edwards

As Halloran parachuted over Tokyo, the Zero that had shot him down sped toward him, and Halloran was certain that he was going to be strafed, as so many falling airmen were. But instead of firing, the pilot saluted him. After the war, Halloran and that pilot, Isamu Kashiide, became dear friends. ~ Laura Hillenbrand

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

A minute passes as we enter Little Tokyo. It's kind of similar to what you see in the movies, with a lot of signs in different languages with "engrish" translations underneath and those big red gates with the curved wood on top, whatever they're called. The passing people on the street are, understandably, largely of Asian descent.
... I get a couple looks, but I suspect it's 'cause my hair is a variety of shades not seen outside of an anime. ~ Vaughn R. Demont

I went to the Tokyo Film Festival in Japan because I love Japanese cinema. ~ Leslie Caron

On my arrival at Tokyo, I
rushed into her house swinging my valise, before going to a
hotel, with "Hello, Kiyo, I'm back!"
"How good of you to return so soon!" she cried and hot tears
streamed down her cheeks. I was overjoyed, and declared that
I would not go to the country any more but would start housekeeping
with Kiyo in Tokyo.
Some time afterward, some one helped me to a job as assistant
engineer at the tram car office. The salary was 25 yen a
month, and the house rent six. Although the house had not a
magnificent front entrance, Kiyo seemed quite satisfied, but, I
am sorry to say, she was a victim of pneumonia and died in
February this year. On the day preceding her death, she asked
me to bedside, and said, "Please, Master Darling, if Kiyo is
dead, bury me in the temple yard of Master Darling. I will be
glad to wait in the grave for my Master Darling."
So Kiyo's grave is in the Yogen temple at Kobinata. ~ Natsume Sōseki

With children like this having children of their own, it was no wonder the world was full of children. ~ Yōko Tawada

The overriding sense of Tokyo ... is that it is a city devoted to the new, sped up in a subtle but profound way: a postmodern science-fiction story set ten minutes in the future. ~ David Rakoff

Tokyo in the late 1960s seemed to be like one of the futures that science fiction presents. Here was the proto- super-technology of the future, electronically, robotically, blahblahblah, intercut with traditional Japanese cultural patterns, Shinto patterns. ~ Ian Watson

In choosing both, you lose both. ~ Sui Ishida

In Tokyo he longed to return to his hometown as soon as he could, even if only for a short time, to see his friends again. At that point Nagoya was the place he needed to go back to. He shuttled back and forth between two different places for a little over a year. But then, without warning, the cycle was broken.
After this, he no longer had a place to go, or a place to which he could return. ~ Haruki Murakami

As we moved from Tokyo the world became greener. ~ Ruth Ozeki

McDonalds in Tokyo is a terrible revenge for Pearl Harbor. ~ S.I. Hayakawa

One night in Tokyo we watched two Japanese businessmen saying good-night to each other after what had clearly been a long night of drinking, a major participant sport in Japan. These men were totally snockered, having reached the stage of inebriation wherein every air molecule that struck caused them to wobble slightly, but they still managed to behave more formally than Americans do at funerals. ~ Dave Barry

My husband and I met on OKCupid. We went out on our little coffee date, and I knew right away he was my husband. He's a handsome, smarty-pants architect from Tokyo. On our first date, I said, 'I wake up like this. I'm Pollyanna Sunshine, and I'm not for everyone'. ~ Geneva Carr

The act of taking is equally evil. We, from the moment of birth, continue to take. Food, connections, even fellow blood. Living to the utmost. Continuing to slaughter, kill, take. Life is to constantly sin. Life is evil itself. I am aware I am evil…. And so are you all. Now, come kill me and, I shall do the same. ~ Yoshimura

My number one goal was to always have to opportunity to have an international business of some sort, opening in Paris, opening in Tokyo, opening in Singapore for example, that was always my dream, and so it came about. ~ David Myers

Sometimes in the mountains the animals make paths by using the same route again and again. If you don't know what you're doing, you might think it's a path made by humans
it looks that way. If you follow that path, the path of beasts, you won't get anywhere at all. People lost in the wilderness, they follow these paths and only get more and more lost. Sometimes they lose their way and they die. It's not a path for humans, it's a dangerous diversion. Are you sure that's the road you want to take? It won't get you where you want to go. ~ Jake Adelstein

I don't do the same food in Tokyo that I do in Vegas and vice versa. If I did that, two weeks later I would have no customers. ~ Alain Ducasse

I noticed that religion gave some people a way to escape dealing with the world: "Things will be better when you die," the people of my grandma's generation said as they worked themselves to death. "God wants you to forgive and love those who do you wrong," some people said to shake off the shame of being unable to respond to the abuse they endured. The holier-than-thou faction found comfort in believing, "The rest of y'all are lost because you don't have a personal relationship with God - our God."
But art engages you in the world, not just the world around you but the big world, and not just the big world of Tokyo and Sydney and Johannesburg, but the bigger world of ideas and concepts and feelings of history and humanity. ~ Wynton Marsalis

I just gave them a little scare. A touch of psychological terror. As Joseph Conrad once wrote, true terror is the kind that men feel towards their imagination. (from Super-frog Saves Tokyo) ~ Haruki Murakami

from Tokyo to Managua, ~ Chuck Palahniuk

I am making this trip to Africa because Washington is an international city, just like Tokyo, Nigeria or Israel. As mayor, I am an international symbol. Can you deny that to Africa? ~ Marion Barry

I am one of the writers who wish to create serious works of literature which dissociate themselves from those novels which are mere reflections of the vast consumer cultures of Tokyo and the subcultures of the world at large. ~ Kenzaburo Oe

When I did 'Tokyo Drift,' a lot of the philosophy that Han lived by I have actually gone through in my own life. As I got older, I realized that I really believe in those philosophies, like the importance of family. ~ Sung Kang

13. A Buddha
In Tokyo in th Meiji era there lived two prominent teachers of opposite characteristics. One, Unsho, an instructor in Shingon, kept Buddha's precepts scrupulously. He never drank intoxicants, nor did he eat after eleven o'clock in the morning. The other teacher, Tanzan, a professor of philosophy at the Imperial University, never observed the precepts. When he felt like eating he ate, and when he felt like sleeping in the daytime he slept.
One da Unsho visited Tanzan, who was drinking wine at the time, not even a drop of which is supposed to touch the tongue of a Buddhist.
"Hello, brother," Tanzan greeted him. "Won't you have a drink?"
"I never drink!" exclaimed Unsho solemnly.
"One who never drinks is not even human," said Tanzan.
"Do you mean to call me inhuman just because I do not indulge in intoxicating liquids!" exclaimed Unsho in anger. "Then if I am not human, wht am I?"
"A Buddha," answered Tanzan. ~ Nyogen Senzaki

But that's the thing about East Texas. Red dirt never quite washes out, and pine pollen is tenacious as original sin. You can leave East Texas, for Houston, for the Metroplex, for the Commonwealth, for New York, or Bonn or Tokyo or Kowloon; but you can never quite leave it behind. ~ Markham Shaw Pyle

Men know how to read printed books; they do not know how to read the unprinted ones. They can play on a stringed harp, but not on a stringless one. Applying themselves to the superficial instead of the profound, how should they understand music or poetry?From the Saikontan, by Kojisei (circa 1600) cited in Haiku by Robert Blyth, circa 1947 Tokyo, p. 73. ~ Kojisei

Tokyo is bigger than Kumamoto. And Japan is bigger than Tokyo. And even bigger than Japan... Even bigger than Japan is the inside of your head. Don't ever surrender yourself ― not to Japan, not to anything. You may think that what you're doing is for the sake of the nation, but let something take possession of you like that, and all you do is bring it down. ~ Natsume Sōseki

When the Bolide Fragmentation Rate shot up through a certain level on Day 701, marking the formal beginning of the White Sky, a number of cultural organizations launched programs that they had been planning since around the time of the Crater Lake announcement. Many of these were broadcast on shortwave radio, and so Ivy had her pick of programs from Notre Dame, Westminster Abbey, St. Patrick's Cathedral, the Imperial Palace in Tokyo, Tiananmen Square, the Potala Palace, the Great Pyramids, the Wailing Wall.

After sampling all of them she locked her radio dial on Notre Dame, where they were holding the Vigil for the End of the World and would continue doing so until the cathedral fell down in ruins upon the performers' heads and extinguished all life in the remains of the building. She couldn't watch it, since video bandwidth was scarce, but she could imagine it well: the Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France, its ranks swollen by the most prestigious musicians of the Francophone world, all dressed in white tie and tails, ball gowns and tiaras, performing in shifts around the clock, playing a few secular classics but emphasizing the sacred repertoire: masses and requiems. The music was marred by the occasional thud, which she took to be the sonic booms of incoming bolides. In most cases the musicians played right through. Sometimes a singer would skip a beat. An especially big boom produced screams and howls of dismay from the audience, blended with the clank an ~ Neal Stephenson

[On Los Angeles:] This city is a hundred years old but try and find some trace of its history. Every culture is swallowed up and spat out as a franchise. Taco Bell. Benihana of Tokyo. Numero Uno Pizza. Pup 'N' Taco. Kentucky Fried Chicken. Fast food sushi. Teriyaki Bowl. ~ Anne Finger

However, while it may be true that the open-air stalls did help get the economy going again to some degree and feed some of the hungry masses (government rationing being so inadequate that a Tokyo District Court judge who refused to eat anything purchased illegally died of malnutrition), the men who ran them were anything but altruistic. ~ Robert Whiting

I thought you'd be halfway to Tokyo by now," she said, stalling.
"Not without you."
Oh, man, she was so screwed. He was bad enough when he was giving her shit. Right now he was looking at her as if
she was the most precious thing on earth, and she knew what she looked and smelled like. The world had turned upside
down.
"I don't suppose you love me," she said. "Even a little bit?"
"Don't be an idiot, Ji-chan. Why else would I be here? Now, do you want to stay here or do you want to prove you're really
crazy and come with me?"
"Will you grow your hair again?"
"If you want me to."
"Then tell me."
"You're not going to make this easy, are you? Su-chan warned me about you."
"She warned me, too. Tell me."
He let out a long-suffering sigh. "Aishiteru," he muttered.
"In English."
"I love you. ~ Anne Stuart

I think Tokyo is going to sink under water soon. All those stupid high-rise buildings will sink and maybe all the traffic will be gone. And everything will be peaceful and quiet. ~ Hayao Miyazaki

Love her he doesn't but the thought he puts
into that young woman
would launch a national product
complete with TV spots & skywriting
outlets in Bonn & Tokyo
I mean it ~ John Berryman

Once upon a time there was a girl named Debbie Jacobs and a boy named Teddy Dennis. ~ Rick Remender

Go ahead, kill me! But live with this: All those people die!

For the rest of your life, somewhere behind the feeds, that human part of you hiding down deep will always wonder how much pain you could have prevented if you hadn't been so weak! ~ Rick Remender

The leaders of Nippon were stupid. They took all of the gold out of Tokyo and buried it in holes in the ground in the Philippines! Because they thought that The General would march into Tokyo and steal it. But The General didn't care about the gold. He understood that the real gold is here - " he points to his head " - in the intelligence of the people, and here - " he holds out his hands " - in the work that they do. Getting rid of our gold was the best thing that ever happened to Nippon. It made us rich. Receiving that gold was the worst thing that happened to the Philippines. It made them poor. ~ Neal Stephenson

I thought about my prison cell and my room in the nurses' dormitory. I understood him all too well. "I want to travel," he continued. "Visit distant countries. Backpack through the Himalayas or paint New York red for two or three weeks. Then fly to Tokyo and eat sushi. Not staying anywhere too long, always on the move, always a new goal on the horizon. That's what I want. ~ Roxann Hill

I tell you, Heaven is a real, literal, physical place, a city as material, as physical, as literal as Chicago or London or New York or Tokyo. ~ John R. Rice

I want to take this fucked up, piece of shit world, fuck it up even more and then give it a factory reset. ~ Eto Yoshimura

He smiled. "Happy anniversary, Samantha Jellicoe. So, Godzilla, or sex?"
Samantha laughed. "How about both?"
"I like that. I get to be Godzilla."
"I guess that makes me Tokyo. ~ Suzanne Enoch

This horde of rubes strolled into Tokyo thinking it holds hope and possibility!! They totally believe they're gonna be respectable human beings!! But in mere months, all these scumbags will run dry of confidence and hope and become broken wrecks whining incessantly on twitter!! ~ Inio Asano

Genuine travelers travel not to overcome distance but to discover distance. It is not distance that makes travel necessary, but travel that makes distance possible. Distance is not determined by the measurable length between objects, but by the actual differences between them. The motels around the airports in Chicago and Atlanta are so little different from the motels around the airports of Tokyo and Frankfurt that all essential distances dissolve in likeness. What is truly separated is distinct; it is unlike. "The only true voyage would be not to travel through a hundred different lands with the same pair of eyes, but to see the same land through a hundred different pairs of eyes" (Proust). ~ James P. Carse

The smell of death was thick in the city of Vārāṇasī. And in Tokyo as well. And yet the birds blissfully sang their songs. ~ Shusaku Endo

Walk around Tokyo and all you see are people trying to sell you something. Tell them okay and before you know you have bought something. Make the mistake of telling your address and now you're on a mailing list. Some old guy pats you on the shoulder and before you know what hit you you're in a hotel room. Stalkers' victims, the ones they kill, are always women. ~ Natsuo Kirino

The house cat has gained ground from the Arctic Circle to the Hawaiian archipelago, taken over Tokyo and New York, and stormed the entire continent of Australia. And somewhere along the way, it seized the most precious and closely guarded piece of territory on the planet: the stronghold of the human heart. ~ Abigail Tucker

Tokyo was a place you could quite happily exist alone and be self-contained. It seemed to promise that it was better to be by yourself. ~ Olivia Sudjic

I noticed that in Tokyo people didn't smell. It was funny. I couldn't smell them, and they didn't say very much: the trains were packed but it was quite silent, like being jammed into a carriage with a thousand shop-window mannequins. ~ Mo Hayder

Along the way I stopped into a coffee shop. All around me normal, everyday city types were going about their normal, everyday affairs. Lovers were whispering to each other, businessmen were poring over spread sheets, college kids were planning their next ski trip and discussing the new Police album. We could have been in any city in Japan. Transplant this coffee shop scene to Yokohama or Fukuoka and nothing would seem out of place. In spite of which
or, rather, all the more because
here I was, sitting in this coffee shop, drinking my coffee, feeling a desperate loneliness. I alone was the outsider. I had no place here.
Of course, by the same token, I couldn't really say I belonged to Tokyo and its coffee shops. But I had never felt this loneliness there. I could drink my coffee, read my book, pass the time of day without any special thought, all because I was part of the regular scenery. Here I had no ties to anyone. Fact is, I'd come to reclaim myself. ~ Haruki Murakami

For my 20th birthday in March, I'll buy myself a present for doing my best. A one way ticket to Tokyo. All I need is my guitar and a pack of cigarettes. ~ Ai Yazawa

You? You can't believe this? I'm the one who has to go to Artemis to save your ass. She was freaking out over Zarek, now how the hell do I explain to her that Mr. Cool-Calm-and-Collected was doing his impression of Spider Man in a bar loaded with tourists and ended up as the main feature on Tokyo news as what's wrong with American culture? Question. How many rules did you break in less than a minute? (Acheron) ~ Sherrilyn Kenyon

What we have seen of recent American action in the Pacific, the bombing of Tokyo and the engagements in the Coral Sea, off Midway Island and at Dutch Harbour, has been sufficient indication that America is beginning to discharge her supremely important duty in the Pacific. ~ Chiang Kai-shek

You went back to Tokyo just about the time the autumn weather was deepening, so for a time I couldn't tell whether the hole that opened up inside me was from missing you or from the change of the season. ~ Haruki Murakami

Rather than a person who hurts others, become the person getting hurt ~ Sui Ishida

You have an impeccable argument if you said that Singapore, Hong Kong, and Tokyo are food capitals. They have a maximum amount of great stuff to eat in the smallest areas. ~ Anthony Bourdain

Sometimes good people make bad choices. It doesn't mean they are bad people. It means they're human. ~ Sui Ishida

What comes from the heart will go to the heart ~ Renae Lucas-Hall

Dr. Y. Hiraiwa, professor of Hiroshima University of Literature and Science, and one of my church members, was buried by the bomb under the two storied house with his son, a student of Tokyo University. Both of them could not move an inch under tremendously heavy pressure. And the house already caught fire. His son said, 'Father, we can do nothing except make our mind up to consecrate our lives for the country. Let us give Banzai to our Emperor.' Then the father followed after his son, 'Tenno-heika, Banzai, Banzai, Banzai!' . . . In thinking of their experience of that time Dr. Hiraiwa repeated, 'What a fortunate that we are Japanese! It was my first time I ever tasted such a beautiful spirit when I decided to die for our Emperor. ~ John Hersey

Walking the streets of Tokyo with Hawking in his wheelchair ... I felt as if I were taking a walk through Galilee with Jesus Christ [as] crowds of Japanese silently streamed after us, stretching out their hands to touch Hawking's wheelchair ... The crowds had streamed after Einstein [on Einstein's visit to Japan in 1922] as they streamed after Hawking seventy years later ... They showed exquisite choice in their heroes ... Somehow they understood that Einstein and Hawking were not just great scientists, but great human beings. ~ Freeman Dyson

When the farthest corner of the globe has been conquered
technologically and can be exploited economically; when any incident you like, in any place you like, at any time you like, becomes
accessible as fast as you like; when you can simultaneously "experience" an assassination attempt against a king in France and a symphony concert in Tokyo; when time is nothing but speed, instantaneity, and simultaneity, and time as history has vanished from all
Being of all peoples; when a boxer counts as the great man of a
people; when the tallies of millions at mass meetings are a triumph;
then, yes then, there still looms like a specter over all this uproar the
question: what for? - where to? - and what then? ~ Martin Heidegger

Tokyo Heist is a fast-paced, exotic reading adventure, a story where The da Vinci Code meets the wildly popular manga genre! Author Diana Renn infuses protagonist Violet with plenty of chikara (power) and Renn's fresh, spot-on author's voice is irresistible. I couldn't put it down! ~ Alane Ferguson

Here in this ocean, in the midst of all this water, with the red flags on those distant buoys flapping in the sea breeze, I find myself unable to treat our house in Tokyo as anything but a dream. ~ Banana Yoshimoto

I can't forgive myself. You tell me there's nothing I can do about a natural change in feelings, but my relationship with Naoko was not that simple. If you stop and think about it, she and I were bound together at the border between life and death. It was like that for us from the start."

"If you feel some kind of pain with regard to Naoko's death, I would advise you to keep on feeling that pain for the rest of your life. And if there's something you can learn from it, you should do that, too. But quite aside from that, you should be happy with Midori. Your pain has nothing to do with your relationship with her. If you hurt her any more than you already have, the wound could be too deep to fix. So, hard as it may be, you have to be strong. You have to grow up more, be more of an adult. I left the sanatorium and came all the way up here to Tokyo to tell you that---all the way on that coffin of a train. ~ Haruki Murakami

Rosette disappeared onto the dance floor. Wells sat in silence for a minute, watching the dancers. The worldwide cult of fast money spent stupidly. The worldwide cult of trying too hard. Moscow, Rio, Los Angeles, Tokyo, New York, London, Shanghai--the story was the same everywhere. The same overloud music, the same overpromoted brand names, the same fake tits, about as erotic as helium balloons. Everywhere an orgy of empty consumption and bad sex. Las Vegas was the cult's world headquarters, Donald Trump its patron saint. Wells had spent ten years in the barren mountains of Afghanistan and Pakistan. He never wanted to live there again. But if he had to choose between an eternity there or in the supposed luxury of this club, he'd go back without a second thought. ~ Alex Berenson