Cole Drake > Cole's Quotes

“Real love is to offer your life at the feet of another.”
― John Ajvide Lindqvist, Let the Right One In

“Keep your relationships brief. Don’t let them in. Once they’re inside they have more potential to hurt you. Comfort yourself. You can live with the anguish as long as it only involves yourself. As long as there is no hope.”
― John Ajvide Lindqvist, Let the Right One In

“You forget what you want to remember, and you remember what you want to forget.”
― Cormac McCarthy, The Road

“Nobody wants to be here and nobody wants to leave.”
― Cormac McCarthy, The Road

“You take many things from the world, but I wonder what you will give back in return?”
― Genzaburo Yoshino, How Do You Live?

“When I think how sometimes people can be brave enough to overcome any fear, any hardship, it gives me a feeling I can hardly describe. To charge right at the things that are painful and difficult, break through to the other side, and take pleasure in that - don't you think that's truly fantastic? The greater the suffering, the greater the joy in overcoming it.”
― Genzaburo Yoshino, How Do You Live?

“It should go without saying that the true worth of a person doesn't depend on that person's clothes or house or food.”
― Genzaburo Yoshino, How Do You Live?

“If it means anything at all to live in this world, it's that you must live your life like a true human being and feel just what you feel.”
― Genzaburo Yoshino, How Do You Live?

“But between the people who produce things over and above what they consume, and send them out into the world, and the people who don't produce anything and who do nothing but consume, which are the great human beings? Which are the important human beings? If you ask yourself this, it's not much of a puzzle, is it?”
― Genzaburo Yoshino, How Do You Live?

“To appreciate art, you must use your inner eyes and ears. You must open your heart.”
― Genzaburo Yoshino, How Do You Live?

“Now I have neither happiness nor unhappiness.

Everything passes.

That is the one and only thing that I have thought resembled a truth in the society of human beings where I have dwelled up to now as in a burning hell.

Everything passes.”
― Osamu Dazai, No Longer Human

“Whenever I was asked what I wanted my first impulse was to answer "Nothing." The thought went through my mind that it didn't make any difference, that nothing was going to make me happy.”
― Osamu Dazai, No Longer Human

“Mine has been a life of much shame. I can't even guess myself what it must be to live the life of a human being.”
― Osamu Dazai, No Longer Human

“The weak fear happiness itself. They can harm themselves on cotton wool. Sometimes they are wounded even by happiness”
― Osamu Dazai, No Longer Human

“For someone like myself in whom the ability to trust others is so cracked and broken that I am wretchedly timid and am forever trying to read the expression on people's faces.”
― Osamu Dazai, No Longer Human

“I thought, “I want to die. I want to die more than ever before. There’s no chance now of a recovery. No matter what sort of thing I do, no matter what I do, it’s sure to be a failure, just a final coating applied to my shame. That dream of going on bicycles to see a waterfall framed in summer leaves—it was not for the likes of me. All that can happen now is that one foul, humiliating sin will be piled on another, and my sufferings will become only the more acute. I want to die. I must die. Living itself is the source of sin.”
― Osamu Dazai, No Longer Human

“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. 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.”
― Osamu Dazai, No Longer Human

“I have always shook with fright before human beings. Unable as I was to feel the least particle of confidence in my ability to speak and act like a human being, I kept my solitary agonies locked in my breast. 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.”
― Osamu Dazai, No Longer Human

“He could only consider me as the living corpse of a would-be suicide, a person dead to shame, an idiot ghost.”
― Osamu Dazai, No Longer Human

“The thought of dying has never bothered me, but getting hurt, losing blood, becoming crippled and the like—no thanks.”
― Osamu Dazai, No Longer Human

“I could believe in hell, but it was impossible for me to believe in the existence of heaven.”
― Osamu Dazai, No Longer Human

“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.”
― Osamu Dazai, No Longer Human

“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.”
― Osamu Dazai, No Longer Human

“How can a man of consciousness have the slightest respect for himself”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Notes from Underground

“I tell you solemnly, that I have many times tried to become an insect. But I was not equal even to that. I swear, gentlemen, that to be too conscious is an illness- a real thorough-going illness.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes from Underground

“The best definition of man is: a being that goes on two legs and is ungrateful.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Notes from Underground

“But what can a decent man speak of with most pleasure? Answer: Of himself. Well, so I will talk about myself.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Notes from the Underground

“I believe that words uttered in passion contain a greater living truth than do those words which express thoughts rationally conceived. It is blood that moves the body. Words are not meant to stir the air only: they are capable of moving greater things.”
― Natsume Soseki, Kokoro

“I do not want your admiration now, because I do not want your insults in the future. I bear with my loneliness now, in order to avoid greater loneliness in the years ahead. You see, loneliness is the price we have to pay for being born in this modern age, so full of freedom, independence, and our own egotistical selves.”
― Natsume Sōseki, Kokoro

“It is not you in particular that I distrust, but the whole of humanity.”
― Natsume Sōseki, Kokoro