Quotes from Osamu Dazai

If he wears a tag, doesn't that make him harmless? It sounds rather sweet, like a kitten with a bell around its neck. A dissolute character without a tag is what frightens me.

Any connoisseur knows you've got to be drunk to really enjoy a good romance.

Human beings are like that, though. They'll do the most unbelievably cruel things when you least expect it.

Most people would take me for over forty.

Sometimes happiness arrives one night too late. The thought occurred to me as I lay there. You wait and wait for happiness, and when finally you can't bear it any longer, you rush out of the house, only to hear later that a marvelous happiness arrived the following day at the home you had abandoned, and now it was too late. Sometimes happiness arrives one night too late.

I suddenly wondered whether Mother might not actually be happy now, whether the sensation of happiness might not be something like faintly glittering gold sunken at the bottom of the river of sorrow. The feeling of that strange pale light when once on as exceeded all the bounds of unhappiness - if that can be called a sensation of happiness, the Emperor, my mother, and even I myself may be said to be happy now.

Excessively passionate characters have a tendency to behave poorly.

Are "people in the world", I wonder, creatures that spend their whole lives greeting each other in stiff, formal patterns, being cautious about each other, then growing tired of each other? I hate meeting people.

When I looked up 'rococo' in the dictionary a while back it was defined as 'an ornamental style emphasizing the florid and the gorgeous, but lacking substance', and I couldn't help but laugh. It was so perfect. How could anything beautiful have 'substance' anyway? Pure beauty is always without meaning or morality.

I wonder if there is anyone who is not depraved. A wearisome thought. I want money. Unless I have it.... In my sleep, a natural death!

I have never derived the least joy out of amusements. Perhaps that is a sign of the impotence of pleasure. I ran riot and threw myself into wild diversions out of the simple desire to escape from my own shadow.

For the first time in my life I realized what a horrible, miserable, salvationless hell it is to be without money.

Real thought takes courage more than intelligence.

Forgive me. I didn't mean to kill you, Polonius. The blade slipped out of the sheath, and it struck you.

That was a really rare event. I don't think It's an exaggeration to say that It was the one and only time in my life that I refused something offered to me. My unhappiness was the happiness 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

I have one request to make of you, which embarrasses me very much. You remember the hemp kimono of Mother's which you altered so that I could wear it next summer? Please put it in my coffin. I wanted to wear it.

By living this way, what will my fortune be? There is nothing. Am I simply a sickly man? What should I do? I had no direction, nothing. I thought that this reckless life of mine was only a nuisance to others and devoid of meaning. This was quite hard to bear.

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

I have no choice. I am a person with no reason to live. I know my lot. Yes, it would be great to die one day sooner.

Extremely tragic is a good description of you.

I can never forget the indescribably crafty shadow that passed over Flatfish's face as he laughed at me, his neck drawn in. It resembled contempt, yet it was different: if the world, like the sea, had depths of a thousand fathoms, this was the kind of weird shadows which might be found hovering here and there at the bottom. It was a laugh that enabled me to catch a glimpse of the very nadir of adult life.

You've treated me nicely, yes, but only because you find me curious and amusing. It's made me feel so lonely, somehow.

If I were to experience failure upon failure day after day — nothing but total embarrassment — then perhaps I'd develop some semblance of dignity as a result. But no, I would somehow illogically twist even such failures, gloss over them smoothly, so that it would seem like they had a perfectly good theory behind them. And I would have no qualms about putting on a desperate show to do so.

I was afraid to go into a restaurant because I was intimidated by the waiters furtively hovering behind me waiting for my plate to be emptied. Most of all I dreaded paying a bill-my awkwardness when I handed over the money after buying something did not arise from my stinginess, but from excessive tension, excessive embarrassment, excessive uneasiness and apprehension.