Quotes from Osamu Dazai

One day, I went to a soba restaurant outside town, and while I was waiting for the zarusoba I opened an old graph magazine. There was a picture of an exhausted, lonely kneeling woman who wore a checked patterned yukata after the tradegy of a large earthquake. With the intensity of my chest ready to burn up, I fell in love with that poor woman. I also felt a horrifying desire for her. Maybe tragedy and desire are back to back to one another.

People depend on death to be complete. While alive, they are all incomplete.

No less than myself, though in a different way, he was entirely removed from the activities of the human beings of the world. We were of one species if only in that we were both disoriented.

I had the feeling that were Mother to die, my own flesh would melt away with her.

We continued to walk without talking. I thought that from now on I will carefully look at the faces of women I encounter, and to some degree, the innocent, transparent beauty of Mabo will appear in all of their faces. Women have become womanly. But the change is not in the women before the world war. The new womanliness has experienced the suffering of war

I wept bitterly, crying aloud. I could have wept on and on, interminably.

A sensation of helplessness, as if it were utterly impossible to go on living. Painful waves beat relentlessly on my heart, as after a thunderstorm the white clouds frantically scud across the sky. A terrible emotion — shall I call it an apprehension — wrings my heart only to release it, makes my pulse falter, and chokes my breath. At times everything grows misty and dark before my eyes, and I feel that the strength of my whole body is oozing away through my finger tips.

If all you've got is just enough talent to get along, sooner or later you'll betray yourself.

Sometimes happiness arrives one night too late.

Society won't stand for it. It's not society. You're the one who won't stand for it--right? If you do such a thing society will make you suffer for it. It's not society. It's you, isn't it? Before you know it, you'll be ostracized by society. It's not society. You're going to do the ostracizing, aren't you?

Isn't it said that memories only grow more beautiful with time?

I yearned with such desperation for "freedom" that I became weak and tearful.

It seems that when people are in a state of euphoria, they don't always notice the suffering of others.

O insanlar kusurluydular. Ama belki de benim a?k?m için ya?ad???m gibi onlar da bu biçimde ya?ayarak ayakta durabiliyorlard?. ?ayet insan, hayata geldi?inde ?u ya da bu biçimde ya?amaya devam edecekse sona varmak için büründü?ü görünüm çirkin bile olsa küçümsenmemelidir. Hayat?n? ya?amak. Ya?amak. Muazzam bir giri?im, insan? endi?eye bo?acak kadar.

En verdad que entre la Inocencia y el Mal no hay mayor separación que el grosor de una hoja de papel.

O quizá lo que llamamos el Mal sea, en su origen, la Estupidez.

There was in his nature a tendency to display a taste for fairness and justice—not the "fairness and justice" that politicians are forever carrying on about, but fairness and justice in the true, original sense of the words. As a consequence, the people of Mishima regarded him as a troublemaker and kept their distance.

I was frightened even by God. I could not believe in His love, only in His punishment. Faith. That, I felt was the act of facing the tribunal of justice with one's head bowed to receive the scourge of God. I could believe in hell, but it was impossible for me believe in the existence of heaven.

I also like to take my glasses off and look at people. The faces around me, all of them, seem kind and pretty and smiling. What's more, when my glasses are off, I don't ever think about arguing with anyone at all, nor do I feel the need to make snide remarks. All I do is just blankly stare in silence.

Virtue and vice are concepts invented by human beings, words for a morality which human beings arbitrarily devised.

Adults are thoroughly schooled in this way of seeing, which makes it quite easy for them to empathize with others. Each teardrop is a source of pride. Young people, it's true, will also sometimes indulge in this kind of trivial emotionality. But if adults acquire this ability only after making compromises with their lives, to put it generously, where do young people pick it up? From junk novels like this one?

The five brothers and sisters, and I myself, have gradually grown more adult, more polite, more guarded—have become, in short, "members of society"—and when we do on occasion meet, it's not the least bit fun.

My unhappiness was the unhappiness of a person who could not say no. I had been intimidated by the fear that if I declined something offered me, a yawning crevice would open between the other person's heart and myself which could never be mended through all eternity. Yet I now refused in a perfectly natural manner the morphine which I had so desperately craved.

I am happy now. Even if I were to hear the four walls all shriek in anguish, my feeling of happiness would still be at the saturation point. I am so happy I could sneeze." Mr. Uehara laughed. "But it's too late now. It's dusk already." "It's morning!" That morning my brother Naoji committed suicide.