Kobo Abe

“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.”

“Más que de la mujer, el hombre tiende a enamorarse de los fragmentos y detalles de las cosas.”

“Будем каждое утро тщательно разглаживать любовь утюгом…”

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

“If from the beginning you always believed that a ticket was only one-way, then you wouldn't have to try so vainly to cling to the sand like an oyster to a rock.”

“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?”

“If there were no risk of a punishment, a getaway would lose the pleasure.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“It was as if, without realizing it, I had been completely disarmed by her legs.”

“So nothing will ever be written down again. Perhaps the act of writing is necessary only when nothing happens.”

“You don't need me. What you really need is a mirror. Because any stranger is for you simply a mirror in which to reflect yourself. I don't ever again want to return to such a desert of mirrors.”

“Suddenly a sorrow the color of dawn welled up in him. They might as well lick each other's wounds. But they would lick forever, and the wounds would never heal, and in the end their tongues would be worn away.”

“One could not do without repetition in life, like the beating of the heart, but it was also true that the beating of the heart was not all there was to life.”

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

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

“Do you shovel to survive, or survive to shovel?”

“Loneliness was an unsatisfied thirst for illusion.”

“The most frightening thing in the world is to discover the abnormal in that which is closest to us.”

“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.”

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

“A keener interest in trinkets of self-adornment than in people is a symptom of alienation.”

“Animal smell is beyond philosophy.”

“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 .... ”

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

“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)”

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

“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...”

“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.)”