Quotes from Osamu Dazai

Pour moi, le monde est insondable ; c'est un lieu terrible.

Au moment où je commençais à oublier, l'oiseau sinistre est venu battre des ailes autour de moi et il a donné du bec dans la plaie de la blessure des souvenirs. Subitement la honte du passer, la mémoire de mes fautes ont surgi devant mes yeux. En proie à une frayeur qui me donnait envie de crier, je ne pouvais plus rester en place.

I have seen three pictures of the man. The Yozo we knew was so easy-going and amusing, and if only he hadn't drunk—no, even though he did drink—he was a good boy, an angel.

You takes things too seriously. It seems you're not satisfied unless you always make yourself the protagonist in some tragedy.

I entered this Health Dojo because the war ended and life suddenly became precious.

Some nights I saw these imbecile, lunatic prostitutes with the halo of Mary

From here it's hundreds of miles to home

Just when I was beginning to forget, that bird of ill-omen came flapping my way, to rip open with its beak the wounds of memory. All at once shame over the past and the recollection of sin unfolded themselves before my eyes and, seized by a terror so great it made me want to shriek, I could not sit still a moment longer.

Just outside the apartment window was a kite caught in the telegraph wires; blown about and ripped by the dusty spring wind, it nevertheless clung tenaciously to the wires, as if in affirmation of something. Every time I looked at the kite I had to smile with embarrassment and blush. It haunted me even in dreams.

Pese a que temía tanto a la gente, al parecer era incapaz de renunciar a ella. Y esas bufonadas fueron la única línea que me unía a los demás. Mientras que en la superficie mostraba siempre un rostro sonriente, por dentro mantenía una lucha desesperada (...)

Revolution and love are in fact the best, most pleasurable things in the world, and we realize it is precisely because they are so good that the older and wiser heads have spitefully fobbed off in us their sour grapes of a lie. This I want to believe implicitly: man was born for love and revolution.

Already by that time I had been taught a lamentable thing by the maids and menservants; I was being corrupted. I now think that to perpetrate such a thing on a small child is the ugliest, vilest, cruelest crime a human being can commit.

Fuera se extendía el océano de la irracionalidad, y lanzarme a nadar en sus aguas hasta morir se me hacía más placentero.

Jusqu'ici, j'ai vécu dans l'enfer. Dans le monde des humains, c'est la seule chose qui me semble vraie.

This was how I happened to invent my clowning.

The incomprehensibility of society is the incomprehensibility of the individual. The ocean is not society; it is individuals.

Around that time, I lost interest in college. I could only see blackness

I wonder how it would be if I let go and yielded myself to depravity.

Learning is another name for vanity. It is the effort of human beings not to be human beings.

To adore. To be adored." What vulgar words, there is something shallow and too self-satisfied in them. Just when these words are spoken on a festive occasion, a magnificent temple starts to fall, and after that, there is only complete indifference.

La sociedad. (...) una lucha entre individuos. Y una lucha en que el ganarla lo supone todo. El ser humano no obedece a nadie.

It is true, I suppose, that nobody finds it exactly pleasant to be criticised or be shouted at, but I see in the face of the human being raging at me a wild animal in its true colour, one more horrible than any lion, crocodile, or lion. People normally seem to be hiding his true nature, but an occasion will arise when anger makes them reveal in a flash human nature in all its horror.

He must live up to his friend's trust— that alone mattered.

But the idea of being respected used to intimidate me excessively.