Kobo Abe, quotes

In heaven’s name what kind of monster would I be, what would I do? Just trying to imagine it was so frightful I wanted to scream.

He who has the right to sit in judgment also has the obligation to listen to the defendant’s statement.

Thanks to this education, I have to experience a new sensation in order to appreciate new pain.

A movie’s a place where you pay your money to exchange faces for a while.

All people cover the window of the soul with a mask of flesh and hide the leeches that live underneath.

Still, the one who best understands the significance of light is not the electrician, not the painter, not the photographer, but the man who has lost his sight in adulthood.

I wanted to get close to you, and at the same time to stay away from you. I wanted to know you, and at the same time I resisted that knowing. I wanted to look at you and at the same time felt ashamed to look.

Shut off by a wall of affability, I was always completely alone.

There was a laugh that changed into the raucous breathing of some frantic wild bird.

What we call beauty is perhaps the strength of our feeling of resistance to destructibility.

In all the diffident, casual glances there were hidden needles bearing a corrosive poison, though those who had never been targets could not be expected to understand.

The instant that expression becomes a smile something suddenly shines forth, and everyone who receives its light has his existence reaffirmed.

Suddenly you began to sob. It was an unnerving sound, like air escaping from a faucet when the water stops.

I was overcome by an impulse to stop time right there and limit the world to what I saw before me.

The torment of imprisonment lies in not being able to escape from oneself at any time.

It was the desperate feeling of loneliness one sees in the eyes of a decrepit old cur on the verge of death.

How long would this silence, like some broken instrument, go on between us?

Our silence was not the vacuum that comes from having said all there is to say. Whatever conversation we had fell naturally to pieces and crumbled in bitter silence.

The wish to become a writer is simply egoism: the desire to become a puppet master and thus separate oneself from other puppets.

Yes, my heart, singing then like a cicada, for the first time experienced a feeling of the nymph emerging from the earth.

Everything comes in time to him who waits—the ancients put it well in the old days.

Defeat begins with the fear that one has lost.