Ashley’s Reviews > No Longer Human > Status Update

“I thought that this cough might also prove useful. I added a couple of extra, exaggerated coughs for good measure and, my mouth still covered by the handkerchief, I glanced at the district attorney's face.
The next instant he asked with his quiet smile,
"Was that real?"
Even now the recollection makes me feel so embarrassed I can't sit still.”

“But it lasted only one night. In the morning, when I woke and got out of bed, I was again the shallow poseur of a clown. The weak fear happiness itself. They can harm themselves on cotton wool.
Sometimes they are wounded even by happiness. I was impatient to leave her while things still stood the same, before I got wounded, and I spread my wual smokescreen of farce.”

“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, 1 invariably feel affection for him, an emotion which carries me away in melting tenderness.”

“Everything he said seemed exceedingly obvious, and undoubtedly true, but I felt sure that something more obscure, more frightening lurked in the hearts of human beings. Greed did not cover it, nor did vanity. Nor was it simply a combination of lust and greed. I wasn't sure what it was, but I felt that there was something inexplicable at the bottom of human society which was not reducible to economics.”

“To show off his "modernity" (I can't think of any other reason) Horiki also took me one day to a secret Communist meeting. (I don't remember exactly what it was called—a "Reading Society," I think.) A secret Communist meeting may have been for Horiki just one more of the sights of Tokyo. I was introduced to the "comrades" and obliged to buy a pamphlet…”

Absolutely love the section that starts with this