Quotes from Kobo Abe

The night is in no way the work of reason, nor it is deduced from experience. It is experience itself.

The fish you don't catch is always the biggest.

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

Suicide is an escape from life. What is life? An escape from death. This means that each of us must die twice. There is the death waiting for us ahead, and the death that comes pursuing from behind.... Once you are free at least from the death that comes pursuing you, you can relax and enjoy life as you go along.

The smell of poison and death clings to any stranger, and people have become allergic to outsiders without realizing it.

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.

Clearly the opposing view that the writer precedes the work carries many dangers. By subordinating the work to the writer, one weakens the work's status as a product of society, overestimates the position of the writer and reinforces the notion that fiction is based on individualism.

We are awkward at espousing the illusions of our fellow men, but we do not want to be so stupid as to drop out of step.

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

The average woman was firmly convinced, it seemed, that she could not make a man recognize her worth unless every time she opened her legs she did so as if it were a scene in a soap opera.

Nevertheless, I cannot help feeling hope. It is not the same as being buried alive, and surely there is cause for hope. Isn't it true that the liabilities of an incomplete person--not being able, without the mask, to sing, to exchange blows with an enemy, to be a lecher, to dream--have become a common subject between me and others, and I alone am not guilty? Perhaps so. Perhaps so indeed.

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.

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

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

Life is reduced to a bunch of fights over territory.

I must doubtless admit that the paleontologist's view that heavily made-up women are prone to hysteria is an extremely astute theory.

When guilty shame wears a mask of curiosity, men are turned inside out, becoming strangers to themselves.

My reason understands very well that I should not go on living any longer. It's amazing that I should still have my reason. But this reason is as fragile as a castle of sand by the seaside that the rising tide begins to wash over. Another two or three large waves and it will disappear without a trace.

Loneliness is terrible, of course, but being betrayed by the mask of one's fellow man is much worse.

I might simply be imagining things, but I do believe that in this parodying of heresy there exists a daring kind of wisdom that might also parody the grounds of orthodoxy.

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.

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

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.

Loneliness was an unsatisfied thirst for illusion.