The dead can survive as part of the lives of those that still live.

Understanding comes hard to persons of high rank who are accustomed to phony lifestyles that involve no daily work.

I think I am doing my works to link myself, my family, with society — with the cosmos. To link me with my family to the cosmos, that is easy, because all literature has some mystic tendency. So when we write about our family, we can link ourselves to the cosmos.

It takes a person of great care and insight to watch for any abnormality in the green grass even while it grows abundantly and healthily.

As I grew up, I was continually to suffer hardships in different realms of life - in my family, in my relationship to Japanese society and in my way of living at large in the latter half of the twentieth century.

The Japanese chose the principle of eternal peace as the basis of morality for our rebirth after the War.

The way Japan had tried to build up a modern state modelled on the West was cataclysmic.