Banana Yoshimoto Quotes

62 Sourced Quotes

I felt how important the simplest things were, like feeling proud, finding something funny, stretching yourself, retreating into yourself.

Banana Yoshimoto
Each one of us continues to carry the heart of each self we've ever been, at every stage along the way, and a chaos of everything good and rotten. And we have to carry this weight all alone, through each day that we live. We try to be as nice as we can to the people we love, but we alone support the weight of ourselves.

Banana Yoshimoto
It'll be this kind of deep blue she said. The kind of color that somehow sucks your eyes and your ears and all your words —the color of a completely closed-in night

Banana Yoshimoto
Ultimately, though, it's living people that frighten me the most. It's always seemed to me that nothing could be scarier than a person, because as dreadful places can be, they're still just places; and no matter how awful ghosts might seem, they're just dead people. I always thought that the most terrifying things anyone could ever think up were the things living people came up with.

Banana Yoshimoto
From the bottom of my heart, I wanted to give up; I wanted to give up on living. There was no denying that tomorrow would come, and the day after tomorrow, and so next week, too. I never thought it would be this hard, but I would go on living in the midst of a glomy depression, and that made me feel sick to the depths of my soul. In spite of the tempest raging within me, I walked the night path calmly.

Banana Yoshimoto
On nights like this when the air is so clear, you end up saying things you ordinarily wouldn't. Without even noticing what you're doing, you open up your heart and just start talking to the person next to you—you talk as if you have no audience but the glittering stars, far overhead.

Banana Yoshimoto
Why were we so far apart, even when we were together? It was a nice loneliness, like the sensation of washing your face in cold water.

Banana Yoshimoto
Here in this ocean, in the midst of all this water, with the red flags on those distant buoys flapping in the sea breeze, I find myself unable to treat our house in Tokyo as anything but a dream.

Banana Yoshimoto
No matter what, I want to continue living with the awareness that I will die. Without that, I am not alive.

Banana Yoshimoto
We ran into lots of old friends. Friends from elementary school, junior high school, high school. Everyone had matured in their own way, and even as we stood face to face with them they seemed like people from dreams, sudden glimpses through the fences of our tangled memories. We smiled and waved, exchanged a few words, and then walked on in our separate directions.

Banana Yoshimoto
Nothing exists in this world but me and my bed…

Banana Yoshimoto
Me, when I'm utterly exhausted by it all, when my skin breaks out, on those lonely evenings when I call my friends again and again and nobody's home, then I despise my own life - my birth, my upbringing, everything.

Banana Yoshimoto
Living like that utterly convinced me of the extreme limitations of language. I was just a chlld then,so I have only an intuitive understanding of the degree to which one losses control of words once they are spoken or written. It was then that I first felt a deep curiosity about language, and understood it as a tool that encompasses both a single moment and eternity

Banana Yoshimoto
I spent most of my time thinking, because I didn't have enough energy to do anything else.

Banana Yoshimoto
When was it I realized that, on this truly dark and solitary path we all walk, the only way we can light is our own? Although I was raised with love, I was always lonely. Someday, without fail, everyone will disappear, scattered into the blackness of time.

Banana Yoshimoto
Truly happy memories always live on, shining. Over time, one by one, they come back to life.

Banana Yoshimoto
The place I like best in this world is the kitchen. No matter where it is, no matter what kind, if it's a kitchen, if it's a place where they make food, it's fine with me. Ideally it should be well broken in. Lots of tea towels, dry and immaculate. Where tile catching the light (ting! Ting!)

Banana Yoshimoto
Inching one's way along a steep cliff in the dark: on reaching the highway, one breathes a sigh of relief. Just when one can't take any more, one sees the moonlight. Beauty that seems to infuse itself into the heart: I know about that

Banana Yoshimoto
Everyone lives the way she knows best. What I mean by 'their happiness' is living a life untouched as much as possible by the knowledge that we are really, all of us, alone. That's not a bad thing.

Banana Yoshimoto
You know, Chihiro, darling- all it takes is one little wrong step and you end up feeling frustrated your whole life, like me.

Banana Yoshimoto
It was at once a miracle and the most natural thing in the world.

Banana Yoshimoto
Of course, it's true that sometimes the pink at sunrise somehow seems brighter than the pink at sunset, and that when you're feeling down the the landscape seems darker too - you see things through the filter of your own sensibility. But the things themselves, out there, they don't change. They existed, and that's all there is to it.

Banana Yoshimoto
I held the feeling in my heart; the urge to discuss it died out. There was all the time in the world. In the endless repetition of other nights, other mornings, this moment, too, might become a dream.

Banana Yoshimoto
I really believe that no matter how old people get, they tend to change in certain ways depending on how people treat them - they change their colors.

Banana Yoshimoto
The sky was incredibly far away, and beautiful enough to make a person wonder why our hearts are never so free.

Banana Yoshimoto
The way we think may be completely different, but you and I are an ancient, archetypal couple, the original man and woman. We are the model for Adam and Eve. For all couples in love, there comes a moment when a man gazes at a woman with the very same kind of realization. It is an infinite helix, the dance of two souls resonating, like the twist of DNA, like the vast universe.

Banana Yoshimoto
In places where a loved one has died, time stops for eternity. If I stand on the very spot, one says to oneself, like a prayer, might I feel the pain he felt? They say that on a visit to an old castle or whatever, the history of the place, the presence of people who walked there many years ago, can be felt in the body. Before, when I heard things like that, I would think, what are they talking about? But i felt I understood it now.

Banana Yoshimoto
For ten years I had been protected, wrapped up in something like a blanket that had been stitched together from all kinds of different things. But people never notice that warmth until after they've emerged. You don't even notice that you've been inside until it's too late for you ever to go back— that's how perfect the temperature of that blanket is.

Banana Yoshimoto
In the uncertain ebb and flow of time and emotions much of one's life history is etched in the senses.

Banana Yoshimoto
This is what it means to be loved... when someone wants to touch you, to be tender...

Banana Yoshimoto