Quotes from Osamu Dazai

Crime and punishment. Dostoievski. These words grazed over a corner of my mind, startling me. Just supposing Dostoievski ranged 'crime' and 'punishment' side by side not as synonyms but as antonyms. Crime and punishment—absolutely incompatible ideas, irreconcilable as oil and water.

Art cannot order people around. Art dies the moment it acquires authority.

I have not the remotest clue what the nature or extent of my neighbor's woes can be.

Mi vida ha estado llena de verguenza. La verdad es que no tengo la más remota idea de lo que es vivir como un ser humano.

Nunca conocí la sensación de hambre. Parece una expresión un poco rara, pero aunque tuviera hambre no me daba cuenta.

The blue sky is most beautiful when see through a prison cell window.

If things went well I would like to become his inseparable friend; but if this proved utterly impossible, I had no choice but to pray for his death.

Me? Are you kidding? I'm going to Hell.

como bastante; pero no recuerdo haberlo hecho nunca por hambre.

It is almost impossible for me to converse with other people. What should I talk about, how should I say it?—I don't know.

I wanted to write only what I wanted to write.

Podría decirse que todavía no he comprendido lo que mantiene vivo al ser humano.

I feared people the more I was liked, and the more I was liked the more I feared them—a process which eventually compelled me to run away from everybody.

To deceive someone who trusts you is to enter a hell that can take you to the brink of madness.

As pessoas trabalham para ganhar seu pão, pois se não comem, morrem." Para mim, não havia frase mais obscura, difícil de entender e, ao mesmo tempo, que soasse mais ameaçadora do que essa.

I wanted to maintain the illusion of peace and harmony even one day, even one moment. Longer. Dreading above all the thought of giving people such a frightful shock, I acted out the temporizing lie as if my life depended on it. I was forever doing that: backing myself further into a corner as I contemplated my own death.

Por lo que parece, mi concepto de la felicidad está en completo desacuerdo con el del resto de las personas, y la intranquilidad que genera me hace dar vueltas y gemir por las noches en mi cama. Incluso ha llegado a afectar me la razón.

The "literary world" was a place I was grateful for, and blessed, I thought, were those who could spend their lives there.

As long as you have the desire to be somebody, you will not fall into decadence. And you don't have that kind of goal. You are passionate about wanting to see what it is like to fail.

Me pregunto si soy feliz.

I find it difficult to understand the kind of human being who lives, or who is sure he can live, purely, happily, serenely while engaging in deceit. Human beings never did teach me that abstruse secret.

The incomprehensibility of society is the incomprehensibility of the individual.

La verdad es que no puedo comprender ni imaginar la índole o grado del sufrimiento de los demás. Quizá los sufrimientos de tipo práctico, que puedan mitigarse con una comida, tienen solución y por eso mismo sean los menos dolorosos. O puede tratarse de un infierno eterno en llamas que supere mi larga lista de sufrimientos; pero esto los hace todavía más incomprensibles para mí.

I drop steadily, inevitably, into unhappiness, and I have no specific plan to stave off my descent.