Kōbō Abe Quotes

12 Sourced Quotes

When a castaway collapses from hunger and thirst it is fear of physical want rather than a real want, they say. Defeat begins with the fear that one has lost.

Kōbō Abe
More than iron doors, more than walls, it is the tiny peephole that really makes the prisoner feel locked in.

Kōbō Abe
It goes on, terrifyingly repetitive. One could not do without repetition in life, like the beating of the heart, but it was also true that the beating of the heart was not all there was to life.

Kōbō Abe
Rarely will you meet anyone so jealous as a teacher. Year after year students tumble along like the waters of a river. They flow away, and only the teacher is left behind, like some deeply buried rock at the bottom of the current. Although he may tell others of his hopes, he doesn't dream of them himself. He thinks of himself as worthless and either falls into masochistic loneliness or, failing that, ultimately becomes suspicious and pious, forever denouncing the eccentricities of others. He longs so much for freedom and action that he can only hate people.

Kōbō Abe
He wanted to believe that his own lack of movement had stopped all movement in the world, the way a hibernating frog abolishes winter.

Kōbō Abe
Suddenly a sorrow the color of dawn welled up in him. They might as well lick each other's wounds. But they would lick forever, and the wounds would never heal, and in the end their tongues would be worn away.

Kōbō Abe
Only a shipwrecked person who has just escaped drowning could understand the psychology of someone who breaks out in laughter just because he is able to breathe.

Kōbō Abe
The barrenness of sand, as it is usually pictured, was not caused by simple dryness, but apparently was due to the ceaseless movement that made it inhospitable to all living things. What a difference compared with the dreary way human beings clung together year in year out.

Kōbō Abe
The thorn of death falls from heaven, and its myriad forms leave us no room to move.

Kōbō Abe
Work seemed something fundamental for man, something which enabled him to endure the aimless flight of time.

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

Kōbō Abe
A tower of illusion, all of it, made of illusory bricks and full of holes. If life were made up only of imporant things, it really would be a dangerous house of glass, scarcely to be handled carelessly. But everyday life was exactly like the headlines. And so everybody, knowing the meaninglessness of existence, sets the centre of his compass at his own home.

Kōbō Abe