Japan Life Quotes

#1. Everything in Japan is hidden. Real life has an unlisted phone number.

Fran Lebowitz

#2. In a time like this, let us trust in God even more. To trust when life is easy is no trust.

Joy Kogawa

#3. As much as any contemporary writer, Murakami grasps the bewildering fluidity of commoditized life.

Japan Foundation

#4. Even in Japan, I don't think that the game culture is established. For example, my father will watch movies but games don't appear in his life at all, I think that that's sad.

Nobuo Uematsu

#5. For everything sacred has the substance of dreams and memories, and so we experience the miracle of what is separated from us by time or distance suddenly being made tangible.

Yukio Mishima

#6. The art of life lies in a constant readjustment to our surroundings.

Okakura Kakuzo

#7. I've been to Japan but I've never been to China, I'd love to go to China. I don't know, I like to go to places that are remote. So, I think I'd like to do that more. And just sort of also explore not having a structured work life someday, to have more free time to sort of see what happens.

Ben Stiller

#8. Japan. Not about the Japanese, but about moments of perfection. Commit it to memory and make good use of it. Because if I come home and you're still pining over this little girl without having given her a chance, I will call you a chicken shit for the rest of your life.

Melina Marchetta

#9. There's an ancient saying in Japan, that life is like walking from one side of infinite darkness to another, on a bridge of dreams. They say that we're all crossing the bridge of dreams together. That there's nothing more than that. Just us, on the bridge of dreams.

M T Anderson

#10. I had a long-lasting love affair with the flavors from Japan and the hustling New York street vendors. And, of course, a life-changing return to Ethiopia has made huge impacts on my life in food.

Marcus Samuelsson

#11. I have worked with this red all over the world - in Japan, California, France, Britain, Australia - a vein running round the earth. It has taught me about the flow, energy and life that connects one place with another.

Andy Goldsworthy

#12. The Germans will be beaten in a few months. And Japan will be beaten a few months after that. If I were to give up my life now, it wouldn't be for my country. It would be for Cathcart and Korn. So I'm turning my bombsight in for the duration. From now on I'm thinking only of me.

Joseph Heller

#13. I just went along for the ride. It was a God-given gift. It is. So you can't say well, you wasted your life because you spent all of it acting, but I think gosh, I've never been to China, I've never been to Japan. I've never been to Yellowstone Park.

Angela Lansbury

#14. The recipe to an unhappy life in Japan is to want to be Japanese if you are not. Anyone who wants to penetrate the country is setting themselves up for tears and disappointment.

Pico Iyer

#15. If plan A doesn't work, the alphabet has 25 more letters - 204 if you're in Japan.

Claire Cook

#16. Life in Japan, nowadays, is nothing like a Kurosawa movie, and only the contemptible Weeaboo thinks that it is. In order to be a whole, well-rounded Otaku, you need to be up on Japanese popular culture, as much as you may be up on anime, samurai philosophy or the canon of Square Enix games.

Alexei Maxim Russell

#17. Living in a world such as this is like dancing on a live volcano.

Kentetsu Takamori

#18. What a strange thing!
to be alive
beneath cherry blossoms.

Kobayashi Issa

#19. Life in this village is like that of a louse hanging on to a wrinkle in a loincloth.

Susumu Katsumata

#20. I miss riding those fast trains in Japan ... 'cause I'd never seen a train that fast in my life.

Ike Turner

#21. We hope that general readers with an interest in Japan will find in these accounts of fieldwork a wide spectrum of illustrations of the grassroots realities of everyday life in contemporary Japanese communities, companies, institutions, and social movements.

Theodore C. Bestor

#22. Life has a time limit. And we are changing all the time. So are our ambitions, desires, and purposes . . . The important thing is to find something that never changes in you.

Fumio Obata

#23. I'm not a big star in Japan. I'm an actor. I have a very normal life. Four days a week, I cook at home. A star doesn't do that.

Ken Watanabe

#24. The magnificence of such objects hardly pertains to the human. They live only in a world of icons and there they participate in rituals which transmute life itself to a series of grand gestures, as moving as they are absurd.

Angela Carter

#25. What each of us believes in is up to us, but life is impossible without believing in something.

Kentetsu Takamori

#26. It is not a happy lot being a princess in any country, but especially Japan in which every tiny aspect of one's life is governed by the most rigid rules of protocol.

Kathryn Lasky

#27. In Europe and Japan, bourgeois life lingers on. In Britain and America it has become the stuff of theme parks. The middle class is a luxury capitalism can no longer afford.

John N. Gray

#28. He wanted to be all poetic, but in an instant he forgot Joe's poem about Japan except the part about 'you are the bell, and I am the tongue of the bell, ringing you,' and a new sound entered his life ...

Melina Marchetta

#29. From the moment of my birth, I lived with pain at the center of my life. My only purpose in life was to find a way to coexist with intense pain.

Haruki Murakami

#30. Japan. So successful was the Japanese 'welfare superpower' that by the 1970s life expectancy in Japan had become the longest in the world. But that, combined with a falling birth rate, has produced the world's oldest society, with more than 21 per cent of the population already over the age of 65.

Niall Ferguson

#31. Lady #1, Maki, had never once given any thought to what was really right for her in her life, simply believing that if she surrounded herself with super-exclusive things, she'd become a super-exclusive person.

Ryu Murakami

#32. Everything is an echo of something I once read.

Dream, hope, and celebrate life!

Love always comes back in a song.

One thing we all have in common is a love for food and drink.

Memories never die, and dreams never end!

What is time?

John Siwicki

#33. The blue of the sky is one of the most special colors in the world, because the color is deep but see-through both at the same time.

Cynthia Kadohata

#34. [The] Japanese were a people in a profound, inverse, reverse, or if I preferred it, even perverse sense, more in love with death than living.

Sir Laurens Van Der Post

#35. Now you should have no qualms about leaving that village. That place isn't fit for kappa anymore.

Susumu Katsumata

#36. Life is like swordplay. Grip it, hold it tightly, then make your move.

Louis Edward Rosas

#37. Between the new, happy him, and the old, depressing him, there stood in the way only his lack of imagination.

Vann Chow

#38. Malacca is such a rest after the crowds of Japan and the noisy hurry of China! Its endless afternoon remains unbroken except by the dreamy, colored, slow-moving Malay life which passes below the hill. There is never any hurry or noise.

Isabella Bird

#39. Why is it that so many people start to value money so much that they trade in most of the hours and years of their life in order to get it?

Andy Couturier

#40. Modern life is so thin and shallow and fake. I look forward to when developers go bankrupt, Japan gets poorer and wild grasses take over.

Hayao Miyazaki

#41. Time is what we have in this life, and how we use it determines what our life is.

Andy Couturier