Quotes from Y?ko Tawada

Time could not be compared with any sort of food: nibble at it as greedily as you liked, there was never any less of it. Knut felt powerless in the face of time. Time was a huge ice block made of loneliness.

Die Mauer in meinem Gedächtnis besteht weiter aus den bewaffneten Männern, die bereit waren, nach einer Anweisung auf Menschen zu schießen. Auf unserem wasserblauen Planeten werden immer wieder neue Mauern gebaut. Wo eine Mauer steht, ist das Leben auf beiden Seiten bedroht.

Assuming he had knowledge and wealth to leave to his descendants was mere arrogance, Yoshiro now realized.

Some humans claim to be made in God's image - what an insult to God. There are, however, in the northern reaches of our Earth, small tribes who can still remember that God looked like a bear.

What do you do for a living? The first thing everyone always wants to know is what I do when I'm not sleeping, what sorts of exams and theses I have to my name as if they wanted to reserve a place in my curriculum vitae for the date of my death. There ought to be a curriculum vitae whose first line is the date of death.

I was only a simultaneous interpreter who was uncertified and thus got very few assignments. Every day after completing my toilette, I would go to the office and wait for work. If by the end of the day I hadn't been called, I would go home without having done anything at all. But sometimes I did receive an assignment, and then I would have a sip of whiskey and go to work.

I was shivering with cold. The woman filled the pitcher again and repeated the process, but it looked less like a shower than a snake shedding its skin. The water slipped off her body like a transparent skin. "Unless I do this, I can't forget the bad things. Instead of screaming out loud, I freeze the screams and rinse them from my skin.

I had always found it unpleasant to have guests in my apartment. They filled up my rooms with strange sentences I would never have formulated in such a way. Today I found the sound of these sentences particularly unbearable. Sometimes I tried to follow only the sense of the conversation so as not to hear the sounds of the language. But they penetrated my body as though they were inseparable from the sense.

Within my roasting brain cells, the scaps of thought refused to cohere.

Adults arrogantly talked about whether food tasted good or not, as if a gourmet sensibility put you in a superior class of people

After the death of all living creatures, all our unfulfilled wishes and unspoken words will go on drifting in the stratosphere, they will combine with one another and linger upon the earth like fog. What will this fog look like in the eyes of the living? Will they fail to remember the dead and instead indulge in banal meteorological conversations like: It's foggy today, don't you think?

Equally misplaced was the notion "maternal instinct." With animals, childrearing is a matter not of instinct but of art. It can't be very much different for humans or they wouldn't keep adopting children of different species.

People are always saying the humanities are dead so it's strange how many conferences there are. (p. 203-204)