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Quotes from Shizuka-na seikatsu (A Quiet Life) — Kenzaburō Ōe

1935–2023 Japan

← All quotes by Kenzaburō Ōe

5 quotes

I don’t think young people need to see the face of the deceased.

Shizuka-na seikatsu (A Quiet Life) (1990)

The ideal teacher student relationship exists when the student is better than the teacher.

Shizuka-na seikatsu (A Quiet Life) (1990)

There could be joy in destruction, too, couldn’t there? Isn’t Jesus Christ’s Second Coming supposed to occur only after a lot of unmitigated destruction? But again, human history is fraught with tragedies in which man spared no effort to destroy with millenarian joy, only to learn that no messiah appeared afterwards.

Shizuka-na seikatsu (A Quiet Life) (1990)

He said he didn’t care if he went to heaven or hell, because neither could be more fearful than absolute nothingness; salvation and damnation were one and the same if the only thing out there was total nothingness.

Shizuka-na seikatsu (A Quiet Life) (1990)

I think the question for him is, how is a faithless person to cope with life. This is where he believes he can find something upon which to establish a literary career. You know, don’t you, how often he talks of Yeats? This goes way back, to when he was very young.

Shizuka-na seikatsu (A Quiet Life) (1990)

Attribution

Quotes and notes from Wikiquote: Kenzaburō Ōe (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0.