The Miner
Sōseki Natsume
Top 10 Best Quotes
“Novelists congratulate themselves on their creation of this kind of “character” or that kind of “character,” and readers pretend to talk knowingly about “character,” but all it amounts to is that the writers are enjoying themselves writing lies and the readers are enjoying themselves reading lies. In fact, there is no such thing as character, something fixed and final. The real thing is something that novelists don’t know how to write about. Or, if they tried, the end result would never be a novel. Real people are strangely difficult to make sense out of. Even a god would have his hands full trying.”
“Even the holiest of lights must lose some of its glory when it is reduced to a function of the real world.”
“As long as you have tears to shed, you can certainly still laugh.”
“When I call him a fool, I mean it only in the sense that he was just as pitiful a creature as I was, and implying the sympathy of one fool for another.”
“The only way to become “normal” is to make a lot of allies and do the abnormal as though it were entirely normal. I still haven’t tried this, but I’m sure it would work.”
“However bad you may feel, however great your anguish, however convinced you may be that your soul is trying to escape, your stomach empties itself out just fine.”
“As long as a person remains conscious and retains any awareness at all, he can never lose just the awareness that he is happy.”
“They were playing it by ear, and this was all it took to be human.”
“Their faces, which on the way down had filled me with such loathing, now seemed like clay dolls’ heads. They were not ugly, not frightening, not hateful. They were just faces, as the face of the most beautiful woman in Japan is just a face. And I was exactly like these men, a human being of flesh and bone, entirely ordinary and entirely meaningless.”
“The human heart, it seems to me after careful consideration, is like water. Push it and it gives way; pull back, and it comes flowing in.”
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Book Keywords:
fiction, human-nature, writing, novelists
