Some of my favourite quotes from Dazai Osamu’s “No Longer Human”

blackandwhitemusician

“I can’t even guess myself what it must be to live the life of a human being.”

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“The more I think of it, the less I understand. All I feel are the assaults of apprehension and terror at the thought that I am the only one who is entirely unlike the rest.”

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“This was how I happened to invent my clowning. It was the last quest for love I was to direct at human beings.”

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“Although I had a mortal dread of human beings I seemed quite unable to renounce their society.”

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“I kept my melancholy and my agitation hidden, careful lest any trace should be left exposed. I feigned an innocent optimism; I gradually perfected myself in the role of the farcical eccentric.”

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“I shall be nothing, the wind, the sky.”

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“But I have no special interest in instances of mutual deception. I myself spent the whole day long deceiving human beings with my clowning. I have not been able to work up much conviction over the morality prescribed in textbooks of ethics under such names as “righteousness”. I find it difficult to understand the kind of human being who lives, or who is sure he can live, purely, happily, serenely while engaged in deceit.”

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“Women found in me a man who could keep a love secret.”

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“To fall for”, “to be fallen for” - I feel in these words something unspeakably vulgar, farcical, and at the same time extraordinarily complacent. Once these expressions put in an appearance, no matter how solemn the place, the silent cathedrals of melancholy crumble, leaving nothing but an impression of fatuousness. It is curious, but the cathedrals of melancholy are not necessarily demolished if one can replace the vulgar “What a messy business it is to be fallen for” with the more literary “What uneasiness lies in being loved.””

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“There are some people whose dread of human beings is so morbid that they reach a point where they yearn to see with their own eyes monsters of ever more horrible shapes.”

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“I’m going to paint too. I’m going to paint pictures of ghosts and devils and horses out of hell.”

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“The pictures I drew were so heart-rending as to stupefy even myself. Here was the true self I had so desperately hidden.”

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“Irrationality. I found the thought fairly pleasurable. Or rather, I felt at ease with it. What frightened me was the logic of the world; in it lay the foretaste of something incalculably powerful.”

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“People talk of “social outcasts”. The words apparently denote the miserable losers of the world, the vicious ones, but I feel as though I have been a “social outcast” from the moment I was born.”

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“If ever I meet someone society has designated as an outcast, I invariably feel affection for him, an emotion which carries me away in melting tenderness.”

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“People also talk of a “criminal consciousness”. All my life in this world of human beings I have been tortured by such a consciousness, but it has been my faithful companion, like a wife in poverty, and together, just the two of us, we have indulged in our forlorn pleasures.”

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“Though I have always made it my practice to be pleasant to everybody, I have not once actually experienced friendship.”

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“I know that I am liked by other people, but I seem to be deficient in the faculty to love others.”

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“What is society but an individual?”

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“The antonym of black is white. But the antonym of white is red. The antonym of red is black.”

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“Imagine saying that the law was the antonym of crime![…] They think that crime hatches where there are no policemen.”

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“What is the opposite of crime?”

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“God, I ask you. Is trustfulness a sin?”

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“Disqualified as a human being.

I had now ceased utterly to be a human being.”

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

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“Now I have neither happiness nor unhappiness.

Everything passes.”

soft-billdenbrough

COWARDS.

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Some of my favourite quotes from Dazai Osamu’s “No Longer Human”

COWARDS.