Quotes from Shusaku Endo

I became a Catholic against my will.

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

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

I was only giving expression to a sad reflection that was rising in my mind. Kichijiro was right in saying that all men are not saints and heroes. How many of our Christians, if only they had been born in another age from this persecution would never have been confronted with the problem of apostasy or martyrdom but would have lived blessed lives of faith until the very hour of death.

but what grieved him most was his inability to love these people as Christ had loved them.

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.

I tell you the truth - for a long, long time these farmers have worked like horses and cattle; and like horses and cattle they have died. The reason our religion has penetrated this territory like water flowing into dry earth is that it has given to this group of people a human warmth they never previously knew. For the first time they have met men who treated them like human beings. It was the human kindness and charity of the fathers that touched their hearts.

His pity for them had been overwhelming; but pity was not action.

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.

But generals who warm themselves by the fire in a tent should not reproach the soldiers that are taken prisoner

Every weakness contains within itself a strength.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

The smell of death was thick in the city of V?r??as?. And in Tokyo as well. And yet the birds blissfully sang their songs.

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

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.

Christianity, to be effective in Japan, must change.