Top 100 Yoshimoto's Quotes
#1. Other good reading from Japan includes Banana Yoshimoto's Kitchen, with its heroine who finds whatever comfort she can in food; Miyuki
Nancy Pearl
#2. All I wanted was to get through this as quickly as possible, to see the day when memories be just memories.
Banana Yoshimoto
#3. I see two lovers looking over the edge of the cauldron of hell. Are they contemplating a double suicide? This means their love will end in hell.' I couldn't stop laughing.
Banana Yoshimoto
#4. I should have told her at the time. I could have taken a deep breath, looked away, and forced myself to say it.
Banana Yoshimoto
#5. She walks away as if she were going to disappear. I wonder if I'll ever see her again.
I turned and saw her yellow blouse receding into the distance as she walked along the busy street. She looked like a balloon someone had let loose in the sky. We watched her go.
Banana Yoshimoto
#6. The sky was incredibly far away, and beautiful enough to make a person wonder why our hearts are never so free.
Banana Yoshimoto
#7. But I have my life, I'm living it. It's twisted, exhausting, uncertain, and full of guilt, but nonetheless, there's something there.
Banana Yoshimoto
#8. It didn't matter whether he was nearby or far away. His image would drift up into your mind just when you least expected it, shocking you, making your chest pound. Making your heart ache.
Banana Yoshimoto
#9. Why is it we have so little choice? We live like the lowliest worms. Always defeated - defeated we make dinner, we eat, we sleep. Everyone we love is dying. Sill, to cease living is unacceptable.
Banana Yoshimoto
#10. If someone could give me some sort of evidence that what we're doing is really love, I'd be so tremendously relieved ...
Banana Yoshimoto
#11. I wonder what it felt to move to a country where you didn't grow up. I had thought about that often since my sister got married. Do you become a character in a story native to that land, or do you, somewhere in your heart, want to return to your homeland.
Banana Yoshimoto
#12. All of the art that I love is about peeling back layers and delving into something that's in a subconscious or dream realm. People like Jan Svankmajer, or the artist Yoshimoto Nara, or David Lynch.
Bat For Lashes
#13. My body knows not to respond to fake love. I guess maybe that's what it means to have been brought up well. Mom,
Banana Yoshimoto
#14. As well as the way he always said Itadakimasu, quietly, before he started eating.
Banana Yoshimoto
#15. I used to think that people are were supposed to be more strange, and dirty, and full of all sorts of emotions, pity and nobility, with infinite layers of complications.
Banana Yoshimoto
#16. Thanks so much for seeing, the first time you met us, that even though we're like ghosts, the two of us, even though we're not supposed to exist, we are alive.
Banana Yoshimoto
#17. People aren't overcome by situations or outside forces. Defeat comes from within.
Banana Yoshimoto
#18. Everything in life has some good in it. And when something awful happens, the goodness stands out even more
it's sad, but that's the truth.
Banana Yoshimoto
#19. I don't put any stock in whatever it is that happens inside my head.
Banana Yoshimoto
#20. In the uncertain ebb and flow of time and emotions much of one's life history is etched in the senses.
Banana Yoshimoto
#21. Everything that had happened was shockingly beautiful, enough to make you crazy.
Banana Yoshimoto
#22. Just when one can't take anymore, one sees the moonlight. Beauty that seems to infuse itself into the heart: I know about that.
Banana Yoshimoto
#23. I wanted to hold everything in place with my thin little arm and weak spirit. I wanted to do what I could with my unreliable body to try and deal with the many scary things that were going to start happening from now on. I wanted to try.
Banana Yoshimoto
#24. And when something awful happens, the goodness stands out even more ...
Banana Yoshimoto
#25. Just being with Nakajima made me feel as if we were detached from history, and had no particular age.
Banana Yoshimoto
#26. She could warm up the air, and then gently blow it out, just like a lily. She smelled of a syrup made of boiled-down despair.
Banana Yoshimoto
#27. It was the truth. I felt a yearning love for every instant that passed.
Banana Yoshimoto
#28. When I'm dead worn out, in a reverie, I often think that when it comes time to die, I want to breathe my last in a kitchen. Whether it's cold and I'm all alone, or somebody's there and it's warm, I'll stare death fearlessly in the eye. If it's a kitchen, I'll think, 'How good.
Banana Yoshimoto
#29. I love feeling the rhythm of other people's lives. It's like traveling.
Banana Yoshimoto
#30. Whenever you get something in this world, you lose something too - that's just the way things work.
Banana Yoshimoto
#31. Parting and death are both terribly painful. But to keep nursing the memory of a love so great you can't believe you'll ever love again is a useless drain on a woman's energies.
Banana Yoshimoto
#32. Love is the kind of thing that's already happening by the time you notice it, that's how it works, and no matter how old you get, that doesn't change. Except that you can break it up into two entirely distinct types
love where there's an end in sight and love where there isn't.
Banana Yoshimoto
#33. The place I like best in this world is the kitchen. No matter where it is, no matter what kind, if it's a kitchen, if it's a place where they make food, it's fine with me. Ideally it should be well broken in. Lots of tea towels, dry and immaculate. Where tile catching the light (ting! Ting!)
Banana Yoshimoto
#34. He doesn't look like a gangster, but then he's not the office worker type, either ... some kind of entrepreneur maybe, or, - wait, I've got it! He looks like he writes manga! Either that or a chiropractor, I guess.
Banana Yoshimoto
#35. Looking out at the lake, drinking good tea. That's his only luxury.
And what an enormous luxury that was.
Banana Yoshimoto
#36. Things keep coming around and around in this world, it's all crammed violently together, two parts of the same skin.
Banana Yoshimoto
#37. And usually, when it's all over, I find that everything has come together surprisingly well. When that happens, I feel like I've been dancing, perfectly in time, with the world. That
Banana Yoshimoto
#38. Be sure to keep your tummy war, try to relax, both your heart and your body, try not to get flustered. Live like a flower.
Banana Yoshimoto
#39. Neither of us realized what was happening. That simply by keeping an eye on each other, without giving it any thought, just by noticing the sound of a certain window sliding open, we were already starting to fall in love.
Banana Yoshimoto
#40. Be sure to keep your tummy warm, try to relax, both your heart and your body, try not to get flustered. Live like a flower. You have that right.
Banana Yoshimoto
#41. Nakajima's presence didn't put any pressure on me, either. Quite the opposite: there was a warmth in the core of my chest when he was around.
Banana Yoshimoto
#42. It was all your imagination. And imagination is sometimes worse than reality ...
Banana Yoshimoto
#44. Now only the kitchen and I are left. It's just a little nicer than being all alone.
Banana Yoshimoto
#45. A particular variety of loneliness, like peering deep into the darkness.
It's only natural, when two separate universes touch.
Banana Yoshimoto
#46. No, I just wanted to recapture the incredibly vivid love we'd had at first- the love I'd shared with the tall man standing next to me, with the man I adored.
Banana Yoshimoto
#47. When there's a plus, there's always a minus. If there's a powerful light, the darkness that is its opposite will be just as strong.
Banana Yoshimoto
#48. She was still there inside me now, just as she always was: a life put on hold, a memory I didn't know how to handle.
Banana Yoshimoto
#50. As long as it had remained a mystery, I could have dealt with it
no matter how enormous a mystery it became. Now that matters had gotten more specific, my imagination began supplying smells and textures.
Banana Yoshimoto
#51. This world of ours is piled high with farewells and goodbyes of so many different kinds, like the evening sky renewing itself again and again from one instant to the next-and I didn't want to forget a single one.
Banana Yoshimoto
#52. Perhaps there are people in this world who love their fountain pens with every fiber of their being - and that's very sad. If you're not in love with him, you can understand him.
Banana Yoshimoto
#53. Me, when I'm utterly exhausted by it all, when my skin breaks out, on those lonely evenings when I call my friends again and again and nobody's home, then I despise my own life - my birth, my upbringing, everything.
Banana Yoshimoto
#54. He was quiet in the way people are when they believe the world would get along just fine without them.
Banana Yoshimoto
#55. I had been walking in silence for so long,I had almost forgotten what my own voice sounded like.My knees were tired;my toes were beginning to ache.
Banana Yoshimoto
#56. willingness to give in is rampant in this society of ours.
Banana Yoshimoto
#57. I read in some book that if you try to hold people back too much when they're dying it keeps them from being reborn as a Buddha,
Banana Yoshimoto
#58. I had the impression that her place was near mine, but even by bus it took about twenty minutes. She lived alone in an apartment house, square and white like a block of tofu, on the edge of town.
Banana Yoshimoto
#59. Her eyes were those of someone who's just fallen in love, someone who sees nothing but her lover, someone who has no fear of anything. The eyes of someone who believes that every dream will come true, that reality will move if you just give it a push.
Banana Yoshimoto
#60. Nakajima's past would always be there, so the foundation could crumble at any moment. That's what happens, I realized, when people destroy other people.
Banana Yoshimoto
#61. When was it I realized that, on this truly dark and solitary path we all walk, the only way we can light is our own? Although I was raised with love, I was always lonely.
Someday, without fail, everyone will disappear, scattered into the blackness of time.
Banana Yoshimoto
#62. If you're always angry, always yelling at people, ultimately that just means you depend on them.
Banana Yoshimoto
#63. Truly great people emit a light that warms the hearts of those around them. When that light has been put out, a heavy shadow of despair descends.
Banana Yoshimoto
#64. Okay,' I said, and waving, we parted. The feeling traveled to some infinitely distant place and disappeared.
Banana Yoshimoto
#65. But if a person hasn't ever experienced true despair, she grows old never knowing how to evaluate where she is in life; never understanding what joy really is. I'm grateful for it.
Banana Yoshimoto
#66. I felt how important the simplest things were, like feeling proud, finding something funny, stretching yourself, retreating into yourself.
Banana Yoshimoto
#67. Perhaps it's because she spends all her time sleeping - she comes and goes just as she pleases in the world of her dreams, she's free to go anywhere she wants. And that gives her access to much more information than people have who are up all the time.
Banana Yoshimoto
#68. these people, struggling so hard to impose a shape on a life when life has no shape,
Banana Yoshimoto
#69. I never tell my boyfriend that I'm busy when I'm not. No matter how effective they are, cheap techniques like that just don't agree with me. So it's always okay, it's always all right. In my opinion the surest way to hook a man is to be as open with him as possible.
Banana Yoshimoto
#70. The lake has all sorts of different faces. And so it's always fresh.
Banana Yoshimoto
#71. Everyone lives the way she knows best. What I mean by 'their happiness' is living a life untouched as much as possible by the knowledge that we are really, all of us, alone. That's not a bad thing.
Banana Yoshimoto
#72. There's someone I might be getting closer to, that's all. But it's not quite coming together yet. I think I'm not ready, either," I said. "Have you got ED?" she said. "Um, no, for a number of different reasons," I said, "but it might be something similar.
Banana Yoshimoto
#73. If people I don't care for are attracted to me, I accept it as the wages of beauty.
Banana Yoshimoto
#74. I was kind of tired, I guess, of knowing people are flesh. Flesh and water.
Banana Yoshimoto
#75. It occurred to me that if I were a ghost, this ambiance was what I'd miss most: the ordinary, day-to-day bustle of the living. Ghosts long, I'm sure, for the stupidest, most unremarkable things.
Banana Yoshimoto
#76. Things that don't matter at all to one person can hurt another so deeply it seems as bad as dying.
Banana Yoshimoto
#77. I wanted to strip and dance naked in front of them, because maybe then I could have demolished the fake, slimy atmosphere they had created.
Banana Yoshimoto
#78. Everyone knows that hidden pull is there, but we go on living our lives, pretending we don't. We keep our gazes fixed, day after day, on the things we want to see.
Banana Yoshimoto
#79. The only thing I'd understand right from the very beginning was that our love was supported by loneliness. That neither one of us could haul ourselves up out of the deadly numbness we felt when we lay together, so silent, in darkness so isolating it seemed to shine. This was the edge of night.
Banana Yoshimoto
#80. No matter where you are, you're always a bit on your own, always an outsider.
Banana Yoshimoto
#81. When someone tells you something big, it's like you're taking money from them, and there's no way it will ever go back to being the way it was. You have to take responsibility for listening.
Banana Yoshimoto
#82. You know, Chihiro, darling- all it takes is one little wrong step and you end up feeling frustrated your whole life, like me.
Banana Yoshimoto
#83. Every time I look into his eyes I just want to take the ice cream or whatever I've got in my hand and rub it into his face. That's how much I like him.
Banana Yoshimoto
#84. beyond that, I couldn't say. There's no point thinking about the future. That
Banana Yoshimoto
#85. I spent most of my time thinking, because I didn't have enough energy to do anything else.
Banana Yoshimoto
#86. Why were we so far apart, even when we were together? It was a nice loneliness, like the sensation of washing your face in cold water.
Banana Yoshimoto
#87. People look so beautiful when their expressions show that they know they have a future.
Banana Yoshimoto
#88. That's the advantage of insomnia. People who go to be early always complain that the night is too short, but for those of us who stay up all night, it can feel as long as a lifetime. You get a lot done
Banana Yoshimoto
#89. Truly happy memories always live on, shining. Over time, one by one, they come back to life.
Banana Yoshimoto
#90. I realized that from now on, my mom's life and mine would have to be completely, unmistakably different. Nothing about us was the same: the times we lived in, the ways we regarded the world, the things we valued.
Banana Yoshimoto
#91. Why is it that everything I eat when I'm with you is so delicious?' I laughed. 'Could it be that you're satisfying hunger and lust at the same time?
Banana Yoshimoto
#92. I know just how slimy people can be, and how people like that are during the daytime. They don't get slimy at night because they're drunk, they get slimy because they're already slimy to begin with. I
Banana Yoshimoto
#94. Things are just things. They can't bring back the dead. it just makes me feel better.
Banana Yoshimoto
#95. There are many, many difficult times, god knows. If a person wants to stand on her own two feet, I recommend undertaking the care and feeding of something. It could be children, or it could be house plants, you know? By doing that you come to understand your own limitations. That's where it starts.
Banana Yoshimoto
#97. Even when I try to stir myself up, I just get irritated because I can't make anything come out. And in the middle of the night I lie here thinking about all this. If I don't get back on track somehow, I'm dead, that's the sense I get. There isn't a single strong emotion inside me.
Banana Yoshimoto
#98. As I grow older, much older, I will experience many things, and I will hit rock bottom again and again. Again and again I will suffer; again and again I will get back on my feet. I will not be defeated. I won't let my spirit be destroyed.
Banana Yoshimoto
#99. I got dressed to begin another day. Over and over, we begin again. (Kitchen, 103)
Banana Yoshimoto
#100. I was happy. I loved the night, I loved t so much it almost hurt. In the night everything seemed possible. I wasn't sleepy at all.
Banana Yoshimoto
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