Top 24 Minae Mizumura Quotes
#2. Science may explain how humans came into being, but it has no answer to the slippery question of how humans should live. Only literature makes it possible to pose such questions in the first place. And if there is no answer, only literature can point to the impossibility of ever finding one.
Minae Mizumura
#3. Writers are writing in every corner of the globe.
Writers are writing, moreover, in rich countries and poor countries alike.
Minae Mizumura
#4. One's identity derives not from one's nation or blood but from the language one uses.
Minae Mizumura
#5. Yes, writers are writing in all corners of the world. Yes they are writing in countries rich and poor. Yes, they are writing despite threats to their freedom of speech or even to their very lives. . . . everywhere on earth writers were writing in their own language.
Minae Mizumura
#6. In the history of humanity, there have been many languages, including French, that have served as universal languages: Latin, Chinese, Arabic, and more. Yet none of them ever ruled the world the way English does today.
Minae Mizumura
#7. The first prerequisite for fine literature is that the writer must see the language not as a transparent medium for self-expression or the representation of reality, but as a medium one must struggle with to make it do one's bidding.
Minae Mizumura
#8. Phonocentrism places higher value on spoken language as being more primary than and thus superior to written language, which it conceives as necessarily corrupting the original Subject - the center of meaning.
Minae Mizumura
#10. In a totally dysfunctional society, the profession of a writer would not exist.
Minae Mizumura
#11. Does writing exist for the typewriter, or the typewriter for writing? . . . the invention of the computer would one day make [the] argument obsolete . . . technologies exist for humans, and not vice versa.
Minae Mizumura
#12. Transported to a different culture, thought often loses its subtlety and can even rampage like a wild beast.
Minae Mizumura
#13. Perhaps when a nation goes through a period of upheaval, those who should become politicians, do.
Minae Mizumura
#14. The year 1946 was the watershed: generations born after that were increasingly exposed to the new, poorer orthographic style and gradually became reluctant to read anything written before the changes unless it was rewritten in that style.
Minae Mizumura
#15. Those who live only in the universal temporality can make their voices heard by the world. Those who simultaneously live in the universal and particular temporalities may hear voices from the other side, but they cannot make their own voices heard.
Minae Mizumura
#16. Those were the good old days when educated Americans read foreign literature in translation, even works written in non-Western languages.
Minae Mizumura
#17. English is becoming a universal language such as humans have never had before.
Minae Mizumura
#18. the Japanese ministry of Education acted with inappropriate haste and unforgivable cavalierness, implementing drastic change before anyone realized what was happening. . . . In English it would be almost ad bad as enforcing a new spelling of philosophy as filosofee.
Minae Mizumura
#19. A strong tie binds novelists to their mother tongue. Though novelists can and do write in languages other than their own, there is a common belief that a novel has a special, almost mystical affinity with the novelist's mother tongue.
Minae Mizumura
#20. waging war against inane language that circulates almost automatically is a writer's eternal mission, and the day will never come when this battles are unnecessary.
Minae Mizumura
#21. I myself am a supporter of multilingualism, but multilingualism without a true understanding of universal language will only make us blind and ultimately ineffectual in realizing that very ideal.
Minae Mizumura
#22. Privately, I felt that living in that privileged environment, where her emotions ran unchecked, had made her oversensitive and unstable.
Minae Mizumura
#23. But for someone like me, who moved into an entirely different world when still quite young, it's as if a deep gap divides my past and my present.
Minae Mizumura
#24. I believe that a girl begins life as a doll her mother can dress up as she pleases, a mirror where her mother's fancies are reflected; but as she grows older, her own nature begins to show.
Minae Mizumura
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