But beauty, real beauty, ends where an intellectual expression begins. Intellect is in itself a mode of exaggeration, and destroys the harmony of any face. The moment one sits down to think, one becomes all nose, or all forehead, or something horrid. Look at the successful men in any of the learned professions. How perfectly hideous they are! Except, of course, in the Church. But then in the Church they don’t think. A bishop keeps on saying at the age of eighty what he was told to say when he was a boy of eighteen.

We are punished for our refusals. Every impulse that we strive to strangle broods in the mind, and poisons us. The body sins once, and has done with its sin, for action is a mode of purification. . . . Resist it, and your soul grows sick with longing for the things it has forbidden to itself, with desire for what its monstrous laws have made monstrous and unlawful. It has been said that the great events of the world take place in the brain. It is in the brain, and the brain only, that the great sins of the world take place also.

Everything was beautiful, and nothing hurt.

The Earth, after all, doesn't creak and groan its way around the sun just so human beings can have a good time and a bit of a laugh.

Don't pointless things have a place, too, in this far-from-perfect world? Remove everything pointless from an imperfect life and it'd lose even its imperfection.

She's so in love with me she doesn't know anything. That's why she's in love with me.

I think most people live in fiction. I'm no exception. Think of it in terms of a car's transmission. It's like a transmission that stands between you and the harsh realities of life. You take the raw power from outside and use gears to adjust it so everything's all nicely in sync. That's how you keep your fragile body intact.

Everybody's born with some different thing at the core of their existence. And that thing, whatever it is, becomes like a heat source that runs each person from the inside. I have one too, of course. Like everybody else. But sometimes it gets out of hand. It swells or shrinks inside me, and it shakes me up. What I'd really like to do is find a way to communicate that feeling to another person. But I can't seem to do it. They just don't get it. Of course, the problem could be that I'm not explaining it very well, but I think it's because they're not listening very well. They pretend to be listening, but they're not really. So I get worked up sometimes, and I do some crazy things.

I dream. Sometimes I think that’s the only right thing to do.

Hatered is like a long, dark shadow. In most cases, not even the person it falls upon knows where it comes from. It is like a two-edged sword. When you cut the other person, you cut yourself. The more violently you hack at the other person, the more violently you hack at yourself. It can often be fatal. But it is not easy to dispose of. Please be careful, Mr Okada. It is very dangerous. Once it has taken root in your heart, hatred is the most difficult thing in the world to eradicate.

Memories and thoughts age, just as people do. But certain thoughts can never age, and certain memories can never fade.

Is it possible, in the final analysis, for one human being to achieve perfect understanding of another? We can invest enormous time and energy in serious efforts to know another person, but in the end, how close can we come to that person's essence? We convince ourselves that we know the other person well, but do we really know anything important about anyone?

Hello virile captain slugger of the gross elephants.

So you want to be a writer? If it doesn't come bursting out of you in spite of everything, don't do it. Unless it comes unasked out of your heart and your mind and your mouth and your gut, don't do it.

Nobody can save you but yourself, and you're worth saving. It's a war not easily won, but if anything is worth winning then this is it.

people read themselves into books, altering what they need and discarding what they don’t.

Some lose all mind and become soul: insane. Some lose all soul and become mind: intellectual. Some lose both and become: accepted.

true revolution comes from true revulsion; when things get bad enough the kitten will kill the lion.

I tell you such fine music waits in the shadows of hell.

I had to keep acting deaf if I wanted to hear at all. I lay in bed the night before the fishing trip and thought it over, about my being deaf, about the years of not letting on I heard what was said, and I wondered if I could ever act any other way again. But I remembered one thing: it wasn't me that started acting deaf; it was people that first started acting like I was too dumb to hear or see or say anything at all.