Kōbō Abe Quotes

Do you shovel to survive, or survive to shovel?

~ Kōbō Abe

Defeat begins with the fear that one had lost.

~ Kōbō Abe

Just as trees bear their fruit before winter, just as bamboo grass produces its seeds just before it withers, sex is simply a struggle with death on the human level.

~ Kōbō Abe

You can only do what you can no matter how you try.

~ Kōbō Abe

If I were just in trousers, somehow I could go out into the world. It would make no difference whether I was naked from the waist up and my feet bare just as long as I had trousers on. Otherwise if you go walking around the streets without trousers, no matter how new your shoes and how elegant your coat, it’s enough to raise a big hue and cry. Enlightened society is a kind of trouser society.

~ Kōbō Abe

Clinging to one’s outward appearance interferes with living.

~ Kōbō Abe

These days only a guerrilla or a box man would want to cover up his identity to the extent of refusing the convenience of instalment buying. But I am that box man. A representative of anti-instalmentism.

~ Kōbō Abe

I want to spy on all sorts of places, and the box is a portable hole that occurred to me under the circumstances, it being impossible to punch holes throughout the world.

~ Kōbō Abe

One measure of a civilization, in fact, is the percentage of misfits in its society.

~ Kōbō Abe

The future is forever a projection of the present.

~ Kōbō Abe

Loneliness—since I was trying to escape it—was hell; and yet for the hermit who seeks it, it is apparently happiness.

~ Kōbō Abe

The world itself, like the mask, began to seem difficult to believe in, and I was stricken with an unutterable sense of loneliness.

~ Kōbō Abe

And again, the dark street. The dark, dark street. The women out shopping for the evening meal of course, and baby carriage and the silver bicycle were already painted out by the darkness; most of the commuters too were already in place in their filing-drawer houses. A half-forsaken chasm of time ....

~ Kōbō Abe

Something whose connection with human experience we cannot grasp is bound to be frightening.

~ Kōbō Abe

It’s a real handicap to have a face with shifty eyes.

~ Kōbō Abe

If animal history has been a history of evolution, then the history of mankind is one of retrogression. Hooray for monsters! Monsters are the great embodiments of the weak.

~ Kōbō Abe

When will you ever accept the true ugliness of health?

~ Kōbō Abe

There wasn't a single item of importance [in the newspaper]. A tower of illusion, all of it, made of illusory bricks and full of holes. If life were made up only of imporant things, it really would be a dangerous house of glass, scarcely to be handled carelessly. But everyday life was exactly like the headlines. And so everybody, knowing the meaninglessness of existence, sets the centre of his compass at his own home.

~ Kōbō Abe

The dial of the clock wears out unevenly; Most worn Is the area round eight. As it is stared at with abrasive glancesunfailingly twice a day, It is weathered away. On the other side The area at two Is only half as worn, For closed eyes at nightPass without stopping. If there is one who possesses a flat watch evenly worn, It is he who, failing at the start, is running one lap behind. Thus the world is always A lap fast--The world he thinks he sees Has not yet begun. Illusory time, When the hands stand vertically on the dial; Without the bell announcing the raising of the curtain, The play has come to an end.

~ Kōbō Abe

It would seem that marsupials are poor imitations of full-fledged mammals. Their inadequacy gives them a certain appeal, we’re touched by it.

~ Kōbō Abe

When he saw the vista of the street reflected in the mirror in which he was looking, he was terror stricken. He had the impression that the whole view had turned into eyes that reproached him.

~ Kōbō Abe

There are apparently two hypotheses about jealousy: that it is a product of civilization and that it is a basic instinct of animals.

~ Kōbō Abe

They say the level of civilization is proportionate to the degree of cleanliness of the skin. Assuming that man has a soul, it must, in all likelihood, be housed in the skin.

~ Kōbō Abe