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The largest website for English phrases and quotes

Category: Kōbō Abe

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

appearance, identity, looking

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

experience, human-nature, life

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 ….

chasm, darkness, forsaken, life

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

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

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.

civilization, cleanliness, skin, soul

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

hypotheses, jealousy

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.

The future is forever a projection of the present.

future, life, present

Defeat begins with the fear that one had lost.

challenge, defeat, fear

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

civilization, society, survival

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.

identity, society, voyeurism