Kenzaburō Ōe quotes - page 2

Kenzaburō Ōe was a renowned Japanese novelist and Nobel Prize laureate in Literature. His works often explore themes of personal trauma, social responsibility, and the complexities of postwar Japanese society. He became one of Japan’s most influential literary voices, both domestically and internationally. Here are 46 of his quotes:

By reading Huckleberry Finn I felt I was able to justify my act of going into the mountain forest at night and sleeping among the trees with a sense of security which I could never find indoors. (Kenzaburō Ōe)

After I got married, the first child born to us was mentally handicapped.

Kenzaburō Ōe

In Japan itself there have all along been attempts by some to obliterate the article about renunciation of war from the Constitution and for this purpose they have taken every opportunity to make use of pressures from abroad.

Kenzaburō Ōe

In the recent years there have been criticisms levelled against Japan suggesting that she should offer more military forces to the United Nations forces and thereby play a more active role in the keeping and restoration of peace in various parts of the world.

Kenzaburō Ōe

Paradoxically, the people and state of Japan living on such moral props were not innocent but had been stained by their own past history of invading other Asian countries.

Kenzaburō Ōe

Even though we now have the half-century-old new Constitution, there is a popular sentiment of support for the old one that lives on in reality in some quarters.

Kenzaburō Ōe

My observation is that after one hundred and twenty years of modernisation since the opening of the country, present-day Japan is split between two opposite poles of ambiguity.

Kenzaburō Ōe

To repeat the error by exhibiting, through the construction of nuclear reactors, the same disrespect for human life is the worst possible betrayal of the memory of Hiroshima's victims.

Kenzaburō Ōe

One day Bird had approached his father with this question; he was six years old: Father, where was I a hundred years before I was born? Where will I be a hundred years after I die? Father, what will happen to me when I die? Without a word, his young father had punched him in the mouth, broke two of his teeth and bloodied his face, and Bird forgot the fear of death.

Kenzaburō Ōe

It's a little bit like what Akari said to his grandmother in Shikoku, during her final illness: 'Please cheer up and die!

Kenzaburō Ōe

We naturally try to forget our personal tragedies, serious or trifling, as soon as possible (even something as petty as being scorned or disdained by a stranger on a street corner). We try not to carry these things over to tomorrow. It is not strange, therefore, that the whole human race is trying to put Hiroshima, the extreme point of human tragedy, completely out of mind. (Kenzaburō Ōe)

Now I was just a transient in the valley, a one-eyed passerby too fat for his years, and life there had the power to summon up neither the memory nor the illusion of any other, truer self. As a passerby I had a right to insist on my identity.

Kenzaburō Ōe

Every time you stand at a crossroads of life and death, you have two universes in front of you; one loses all relation to you because you die, the other maintains its relation to you because you survive in it. Just as you would take off your clothes, you abandon the universe in which you are still alive. In other words, various universes emerge around each of us the way tree limbs and leaves branch away from the trunk.

Kenzaburō Ōe

I think the question for him is, how is a faithless person to cope with life. This is where he believes he can find something upon which to establish a literary career. You know, don't you, how often he talks of Yeats? This goes way back, to when he was very young.

Kenzaburō Ōe

He said he didn't care if he went to heaven or hell, because neither could be more fearful than absolute nothingness; salvation and damnation were one and the same if the only thing out there was total nothingness.

Kenzaburō Ōe

My mentally handicapped son Hikari was awakened by the voices of birds to the music of Bach and Mozart, eventually composing his own works. The little pieces that he first composed were full of fresh splendour and delight. They seemed like dew glittering on grass leaves. The word innocence is composed of in - "not" and nicer - "hurt", that is, "not to hurt". Hikari's music was in this sense a natural effusion of the composer's own innocence.

Kenzaburō Ōe

I have a habit to be reborn as a writer. So if I find myself in a crisis that I have never experienced, I can be born, or I can write something, by the power of the habit. Even a soldier or a farmer or a fisherman can be reborn by the power of the habit when he meets the greatest crisis of his life.

Kenzaburō Ōe

In principle, I am an anarchist. Kurt Vonnegut once said he was an agnostic who respects Jesus Christ. I am an anarchist who loves democracy.

Kenzaburō Ōe

I was on a promotional tour in Great Britain, and I stopped in Wales. I was there for three days and I ran out of books to read. I went to a local bookstore and asked the person working there to recommend some books in English. He suggested a collection by a poet who was from the area but warned me that the book wasn't selling very well. The poet was R. S. Thomas, and I bought everything they had. As I read him, I realized that he was the most important poet I could be reading at that point in my life.

Kenzaburō Ōe

Under that title Kawabata talked about a unique kind of mysticism which is found not only in Japanese thought but also more widely Oriental thought. By 'unique' I mean here a tendency towards Zen Buddhism. Even as a twentieth-century writer Kawabata depicts his state of mind in terms of the poems written by medieval Zen monks. Most of these poems are concerned with the linguistic impossibility of telling truth. According to such poems words are confined within their closed shells. The readers can not expect that words will ever come out of these poems and get through to us. One can never understand or feel sympathetic towards these Zen poems except by giving oneself up and willingly penetrating into the closed shells of those words.

Kenzaburō Ōe

Literature must be written from the periphery toward the center, and we can criticize the center. Our credo, our theme, or our imagination is that of the peripheral human being. The man who is in the center does not have anything to write. From the periphery, we can write the story of the human being and this story can express the humanity of the center, so when I say the word periphery, this is a most important creed of mine. (Kenzaburō Ōe)

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Kenzaburō Ōe

Kenzaburō Ōe - Image

Photo: Thesupermat, CC BY-SA 3.0

Occupation: Japanese Writer
Born: January 31, 1935
Died: March 3, 2023
Quotes count: 46
Wikipedia: Kenzaburō Ōe

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