Mandarins Quotes

“I could wish for nothing more than to die for a childish dream in which I truly believed.”
― Ryunosuke Akutagawa, Mandarins: Stories

“For truly he was now being left as a bleached corpse in a vast and desolate moor of humanity.”
― Ryūnosuke Akutagawa, Mandarins: Stories

“Yet what a wretched creature I am, not to be able to depend upon myself!”
― Ryūnosuke Akutagawa, Mandarins: Stories

“...O-suzu left whatever work she was doing at her sewing machine and dragged Takeo back to O-yoshi and her son.
How dare you behave so selfishly! Now tell O-yoshi-san that you are sorry. Get down on the mats and make a proper bow!”
― Ryunosuke Akutagawa, Mandarins: Stories

“Even Zeus, the grandest of the gods, is no match for the goddesses of vengeance.”
― Ryūnosuke Akutagawa, Mandarins: Stories

“His own disciples were not lamenting the death of their master but rather their own loss at his passing. They were not bewailing the piteous demise of their guide in the wilderness but rather their own abandonment here in the twilight.”
― Ryūnosuke Akutagawa, Mandarins: Stories

“That which is most precious in a human life is indeed found in such an irreplaceable moment of ecstasy. To hurl a single wave into a void of depravity, as dark as a nocturnal sea, and capture in the foam the light of a not-yet-risen moon . . . It is such a life that is worth living.”
― Ryūnosuke Akutagawa, Mandarins: Stories

“It took two or three months more for me to discern little by little that here there was nothing to be dismissed with laughter, that behind the melancholic mask lay a terrible anguish.”
― Ryūnosuke Akutagawa, Mandarins: Stories

“Yet, as we humans are by nature coldhearted, of what use is it to offer moral reprobation?”
― Ryūnosuke Akutagawa, Mandarins: Stories

“For all our talk about modern enlightenment, Japan is still quite openly a land of kept women.”
― Ryūnosuke Akutagawa, Mandarins: Stories

“Of fierce love, the joy of fierce creativity, or fierce moral passion they are ignorant. All in all, they know nothing of the sheer intensity of spirit that can render this world sublime. And if they are marked by a mortal wound, they surely also contain a pernicious poison. One of its properties is direct, enabling it to transform ordinary human beings into sophisticates; another works by way of reaction, making them all more common.”
― Ryūnosuke Akutagawa, Mandarins: Stories

“Thirst will drive one to drink even from muddy water.”
― Ryūnosuke Akutagawa, Mandarins: Stories

“We all find ourselves riding the same merry-go-round of life and, at some moment as we turn, encounter 'happiness', only to have it pass us by in the very moment that we reach out for it. If such is truly our desire, we should jump off.”
― Ryūnosuke Akutagawa, Mandarins: Stories