Ryūnosuke Akutagawa Quotes

Yes -- or rather, it's not so much that I want to die as that I'm tired of living.

I have no conscience at all -- least of all an artistic conscience. All I have is nerves.

Chained inside the carriage is a sinful woman. When we set the carriage afire, her flesh will be roasted, her bones will be charred: she will die an agonizing death. Never again will you have such a perfect model for the screen. Do not fail to watch as her snow-white flesh erupts in flames. See and remember her long black hair dancing in a whirl of sparks!

I don't have the strength to keep writing this. To go on living with this feeling is painful beyond description. Isn't there someone kind enough to strangle me in my sleep?

I could wish for nothing more than to die for a childish dream in which I truly believed.

A man sometimes devotes his life to a desire which he is not sure will ever be fulfilled. Those who laugh at this folly are, after all, no more than mere spectators of life.

..he understood far more deeply than anyone else the loneliness that lurked beneath his jaunty mask.

I could have sworn that the man's eyes were no longer watching his daughter dying in agony, that instead the gorgeous colors of flames and the sight of a woman suffering in them were giving him joy beyond measure.

No matter how accomplished one might be in any branch of learning or art, one would have to be condemned to hell, if on where not endowed with th five cardinal virtues of Confucius-benevolence, justice, courtesy, wisdom and fidelity

Isn't there someone kind enough to come strangle me in my sleep?

I have heard unsavory rumors about you and the umbrella-maker's daughter

I may be a lunatic, but then, wasn't my lunacy caused by a monster that lurks at the bottom of every human mind? Those who call me a madman and spurn me may become lunatics tomorrow. They harbor the same monster.

As you can imagine, those who had fallen this far had been so worn down by their tortures in the seven other hells that they no longer had the strength to cry out.

He felt so lost, he said later, that the familiar studio felt like a haunted valley deep in the mountains, with the smell of rotting leaves, the spray of a waterfall, the sour fumes of fruit stashed away by a monkey; even the dim glow of the master's oil lamp on its tripod looked to him like misty moonlight in the hills.

It is unfortunate for the gods that, unlike us, they cannot commit suicide.

17. Butterfly A butterfly fluttered its wings in a wind thick with the smell of seaweed. His dry lips felt the touch of the butterfly for the briefest instant, yet the wisp of wing dust still shone on his lips years later.