Kobo Abe Quotes

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

Kobo Abe

#2. Do you shovel to survive, or survive to shovel?

Kobo Abe

#3. 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.

Kobo Abe

#4. 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?

Kobo Abe

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

Kobo Abe

#6. Work seemed something fundamental for man, something which enabled him to endure the aimless flight of time.

Kobo Abe

#7. 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.

Kobo Abe

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

Kobo Abe

#9. 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.

Kobo Abe

#10. 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.

Kobo Abe

#11. Perhaps the act of writing is necessary when nothing happens.

Kobo Abe

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

Kobo Abe

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

Kobo Abe

#14. Being free always involves being lonely.

Kobo Abe

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

Kobo Abe

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

Kobo Abe

#17. 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.

Kobo Abe

#18. 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 ...

Kobo Abe

#19. 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.

Kobo Abe

#20. The beauty of sand, in other words, belonged to death. it was the beauty of death that ran through the magnificence of its ruins and its great power of destruction

Kobo Abe

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

Kobo Abe

#22. Basically, there is nothing new in the behavior of monsters, for the monster himself is nothing more than an invention of his victims.

Kobo Abe

#23. 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.

Kobo Abe

#24. 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 ...

Kobo Abe

#25. 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?

Kobo Abe

#26. 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.

Kobo Abe

#27. Defeat begins with the fear that one has lost.

Kobo Abe

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

Kobo Abe

#29. Time cannot be spurred on like a horse.

Kobo Abe

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

Kobo Abe

#31. 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.

Kobo Abe

#32. 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.

Kobo Abe

#33. These days only a guerrilla or a box man would want to cover up his identity to the extent of refusing the convenience of instalment buying. But I am that box man. A representative of anti-instalmentism.

Kobo Abe

#34. 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.

Kobo Abe

#35. 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.

Kobo Abe

#36. 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.

Kobo Abe

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

Kobo Abe

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

Kobo Abe

#39. Now that you are dead, you are splendid. Photographs of people who have just died are worth twenty percent more, and for suicides there is an additional five percent. Now that you are dead you are much in demand.

Kobo Abe

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

Kobo Abe

#41. Clinging to one's outward appearance interferes with living.

Kobo Abe

#42. 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.

Kobo Abe

#43. The whole surface of her body was covered with a coat of fine sand, which hid the details and brought out the feminine lines; she seemed a statue gilded with sand.

Kobo Abe

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

Kobo Abe

#45. You can't force yourself into something you can't understand, you know.

Kobo Abe

#46. 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?

Kobo Abe

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

Kobo Abe

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

Kobo Abe

#49. 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.

Kobo Abe

#50. 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.

Kobo Abe

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

Kobo Abe

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

Kobo Abe

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

Kobo Abe

#54. When will you ever accept the true ugliness of health?

Kobo Abe

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

Kobo Abe

#56. 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?

Kobo Abe

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

Kobo Abe

#58. If there were no risk of a punishment, a getaway would lose the pleasure.

Kobo Abe

#59. The future is forever a projection of the present.

Kobo Abe

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

Kobo Abe

#61. The moment a man and a woman decide to get married, both of them should put aside such doubts and concerns. If they can't agree, it is best not to opt for trouble from the very beginning.

Kobo Abe

#62. They say the level of civilization is proportionate to the degree of cleanliness of the skin. Assuming that man has a soul, it must, in all likelihood, be housed in the skin.

Kobo Abe

#63. 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.

Kobo Abe

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

Kobo Abe

#65. When he saw the vista of the street reflected in the mirror in which he was looking, he was terror stricken. He had the impression that the whole view had turned into eyes that reproached him.

Kobo Abe

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

Kobo Abe

#67. 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.

Kobo Abe

#68. 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.

Kobo Abe

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

Kobo Abe

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

Kobo Abe

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

Kobo Abe

#72. Far happier he, who, young and full of pride And radiant with the glory of the sun, Leaves earth before his singing time is done. All wounds of Time the graveyard flowers hide, His beauty lives, as fresh as when he died.

Kobo Abe

#73. Nature with her wealth of birds and flowers, Has in her heart a place for every weed; For her quick eyes require no microscope To note the varied wonders and delights That the Creator's humblest works possess.

Kobo Abe

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

Kobo Abe

#75. 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.

Kobo Abe

#76. 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.

Kobo Abe

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

Kobo Abe

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

Kobo Abe

#79. 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)

Kobo Abe

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

Kobo Abe

#81. Could having a face be such an important requirement? Was being seen the cost of the right to see?

Kobo Abe

#82. During the say the traces of summer , reluctant to depart, still set the sand afire, and their bare feet could not stand it for more than five minutes at a time. But when the sun set, the crack-ridden walls of the room let in the cold night damp.

Kobo Abe

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

Kobo Abe

#84. No matter how many faces I have, there is no changing the fact that I am me.

Kobo Abe

#85. [ ... ]love strips the mask from each of us, and we must endeavor for those we love to put the mask on so that it can be taken off again. For if there is no mask to start with, there is no pleasure in removing it, is there?

Kobo Abe

#86. 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?

Kobo Abe

#87. 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?

Kobo Abe

#88. One measure of a civilization, in fact, is the percentage of misfits in its society.

Kobo Abe

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

Kobo Abe

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

Kobo Abe

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

Kobo Abe

#92. Loneliness was an unsatisfied thirst for illusion.

Kobo Abe