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Osamu Dazai Quotes

1909–1948

Writers

Random Osamu Dazai quote

188 quotes

It was less the fact of Yoshiko's defilement than the defilement of her trust in people which became so persistent a source of grief as almost to render my life insupportable.

Humanity? Don't be silly. I know. It is knocking down your fellow-men for the sake of your own happiness.

When I liked something I tasted it hesitantly, furtively, as though it were extremely bitter.

In spite of my suffering, at the thought that I was sure to end up by killing myself, I cried aloud and burst into tears.

They were happy, the two of them. I'd been a fool to come between them.

Mama's love. When I thought of that I couldn't die.

Masks in one layer after another—as many as ten or twenty—had fastened themselves upon me, and I could no longer tell how sad any one of them really was.

They scolded us for not having any real hopes or real ambitions, but if we were to pursue our true ideals, would these people watch and guide us along the way?

I yearned for everything long gone.

A life free of lies! Ah, but that, too, was, by definition, a lie. Surely a lie already dwelled in the heart of anyone who sought to make such distinctions and stand in judgment.

I thought that it was one of the most elegant services provided by the railways. When later I discovered that the bridge was nothing more than a utilitarian device, I lost all interest in it.

And I was incapable of living all by myself in those lodgings where I didn't know a soul. It terrified me to sit by myself quietly in my room. I felt frightened, as if I might be set upon or struck by someone at any moment.

It wasn't an ordinary sickness. God had killed me, and only after He had made me into someone entirely different from the person I had been, did he call me back to life.

As long as I can make them laugh, it doesn’t matter how, I’ll be alright. If I succeed in that, the human beings probably won’t mind it too much if I remain outside their lives. The one thing I must avoid is becoming offensive in their eyes: I shall be nothing, the wind, the sky.

She lay down beside me, Towards dawn she pronounced for the first time the word “death.” She too seemed to be weary beyond endurance of the task of being a human being; and when I reflected on my dread of the world and its bothersomeness, on money, the movement, women, my studies, it seemed impossible that I could go on living. I consented easily to her proposal.

The real things are apt to be deviant.

Spread my usual smokescreen of farce.

“I don't understand the world."
"I don't either. I wonder if anyone does. We all remain children, no matter how much time goes by. We don't understand anything.”

I have sometimes thought that I have been burdened with a pack of ten misfortunes, any one of which if borne by my neighbor would be enough to make a murderer out of him.

I felt as though the vessel if my suffering had become empty, as if nothing could interest me now. I had lost even the ability to suffer.

Attribution

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