Shusaku Quotes

#1. Certainly, my exposure in high school to writers like Flannery O'Connor, Shusaku Endo, Fyodor Dostoevsky and Graham Greene was formative.

Phil Klay

#2. If we did not believe that truth is universal, why should so many missionaries endure these hardships? It is precisely because truth is common to all countries and all times that we call it truth. If a true doctrine were not true alike in Portugal and Japan we could not call it true.

Shusaku Endo

#3. Sin, he reflected, is not what it is usually thought to be; it is not to steal and tell lies. Sin is for one man to walk brutally over the life of another and to be quite oblivious of the wounds he has left behind.

Shusaku Endo

#4. True religion should be able to respond to the dark melodies, the faulty and hideous sounds that echo from the heart of men.

Shusaku Endo

#5. When you sail, don't
Pull up the anchor weeping.
Be a man, do it laughing ...

Shusaku Endo

#6. But the scrawny, powerless man with his arms outstretched on the cross had at some point reclaimed Otsu. Still, that doesn't change the fact that I won. With startling rapacity God had merely picked up a man I discarded.

Shusaku Endo

#7. Every weakness contains within itself a strength.

Shusaku Endo

#8. The sound of darkness was certainly intricately linked to the sense of being alone but unrelated to this was the sound of the palpitations of men and women experiencing the sense of utter solitude. There was no doubt about it. This was a sound audible only on evenings such as this.

Shusaku Endo

#9. To be a saint or a man of too good a nature in today's pragmatic world, with everyone out to get the other fellow, was equivalent to being a fool, wasn't it?

Shusaku Endo

#10. When you were still here, Isobe thought, death seemed so far removed from me. It was as though you stood with both arms outstretched, keeping death from me. But now that you're gone, suddenly it seems right here in front of me.

Shusaku Endo

#11. Trample! Trample! It is to be trampled on by you that I am here.

Shusaku Endo

#12. Desolation would not be the proper word to describe his feelings now; it was more the sense of emptiness he imagined he might feel standing all alone on the surface of the moon.

Shusaku Endo

#13. The priest raises his foot. In it he feels a dull, heavy pain. This is no mere formality. He will now trample on what he has considered the most beautiful thing in his life, on what he has believed most pure, on what is filled with the ideals and the dreams of man.

Shusaku Endo

#14. Christianity, to be effective in Japan, must change.

Shusaku Endo

#15. The earth is not just for the clever and the strong.

Shusaku Endo

#16. Lord, why are you silent? Why are you always silent ... ?

Shusaku Endo

#17. We'll shake, we'll shake the tree of dreams,
That solitary tree of dreams
In the centre of the verdant field.

Shusaku Endo

#18. No matter what the circumstances, no man can completely escape from vanity.

Shusaku Endo

#19. Christ did not die for the good and beautiful. It is easy enough to die for the good and beautiful; the hard thing is to die for the miserable and corrupt.

Shusaku Endo

#20. The important thing in this life is to link your sadness to the sadness of others.

Shusaku Endo

#21. A person never knows their own true face. Everybody thinks that the phoney, posed social mask they wear is their real face.

Shusaku Endo

#22. The reason why darkness terrifying for us, he reflected, is that there remains in us the instinctive fear the primitive man had when there was as yet no light.

Shusaku Endo

#23. We priests are in some ways a sad group of men. Born into the world to render service to mankind, there is no one more wretchedly alone than the priest who does not measure up to his task.

Shusaku Endo

#24. There are neither the strong nor the weak. Can anyone say that the weak do not suffer more than the strong?

Shusaku Endo

#25. Man is a strange being. He always has a feeling somewhere in his heart that whatever the danger he will pull through. It's just like when on a rainy day you imagine the faint rays of the sun shining on a distant hill.

Shusaku Endo

#26. When you suffer, I suffer with you. To the end I am close to you.

Shusaku Endo

#27. The seeds of salvation are buried in every act of evil.

Shusaku Endo

#28. People are linked together by enmity than by love.

Shusaku Endo

#29. In order to pile weakness upon weakness he was trying to drag others along the path that he himself had walked.

Shusaku Endo

#30. I don't want to die in darkness any thicker than this. I want to bring some kind of resolution in my life.

Shusaku Endo

#31. But pity was not action. It was not love. Pity, like passion, was no more than a kind of instinct.

Shusaku Endo

#32. A man who wields a pen has to be accountable to society.

Shusaku Endo

#33. Prayer does nothing to alleviate suffering.

Shusaku Endo

#34. Yet one priest remaining in this country has the same significance as a single candle burning in the catacombs.

Shusaku Endo

#35. but our Lord was not silent. Even if he had been silent, my life until this day would have spoken of Him.

Shusaku Endo

#36. I became a Catholic against my will.

Shusaku Endo

#37. I did pray. I kept on Praying. But prayer did nothing to alleviate their suffering.

Shusaku Endo

#38. At the core of her senseless actions, she vaguely perceived that she yearned for something. A something that would provide her with a sure sense of fulfillment. But she could not fathom what that something might be.

Shusaku Endo