The Face of Another Quotes

“You don't need me. What you really need is a mirror. Because any stranger is for you simply a mirror in which to reflect yourself. I don't ever again want to return to such a desert of mirrors.”
― Kōbō Abe, The Face of Another

“Still, the one who best understands the significance of light is not the electrician, not the painter, not the photographer, but the man who lost his sight in adulthood. There must be the wisdom of deficiency in deficiency, just as there is the wisdom of plenty in plenty.”
― Kobo Abe, The Face of Another

“Could having a face be such an important requirement? Was being seen the cost of the right to see?”
― Kōbō Abe, The Face of Another

“So nothing will ever be written down again. Perhaps the act of writing is necessary only when nothing happens.”
― Kōbō Abe, The Face of Another

“It was perhaps relief and confidence stemming from the opportunity to tempt you into being my accomplice, however indirectly, in the lonely work of producing the mask. For me, whatever you may say, you are the most important "other person." No, I do not mean it in a negative sense. I meant that the one who must first restore the roadway, the one whose name I had to write on the first letter, was first on my list of "others." (Under any circumstances, I simply did not want to lose you. To lose you would be symbolic of losing the world.)”
― Kobo Abe, The Face of Another

“No matter how many faces I have, there is no changing the fact that I am me.”
― Kōbō Abe, The Face of Another

“Loneliness—since I was trying to escape it—was hell; and yet for the hermit who seeks it, it is apparently happiness.”
― Kōbō Abe, The Face of Another

“Basically, there is nothing new in the behavior of monsters, for the monster himself is nothing more than an invention of his victims.”
― Kōbō Abe, The Face of Another

“The torment of imprisonment lies in not being able to escape from oneself at any time.”
― Kōbō Abe, The Face of Another

“Unable to suspect others, unable to believe in others, one would to live in a suspended state, a state of bankrupt human relations, as if one were looking into a mirror that reflects nothing.”
― Kōbō Abe, The Face of Another

“[...]love strips the mask from each of us, and we must endeavor for those we love to put the mask on so that it can be taken off again. For if there is no mask to start with, there is no pleasure in removing it, is there?”
― Kōbō Abe, The Face of Another

“A crowd isn't formed after people gather; people gather after the crowd forms.”
― Kōbō Abe, The Face of Another

“How wonderful it would be, frankly, if everybody in the world would suddenly lose his sight or forget the existence of light. Immediately, there would be agreement about form. Everybody would accept the fact that a loaf of bread is a loaf of bread whether triangular or round. The girl a little while ago would have kept her eyes shut and listened to my voice. If she had, perhaps we could have become friendly and I could have taken her to the playground and we could have eaten ice cream together. Just because there was light, she heedlessly thought that a triangular loaf of bread was not bread but a triangle. This thing called light is itself transparent, but it apparently changes into something nontransparent.”
― Kōbō Abe, The Face of Another

“Of course, according to one theory a mask is apparently the expression of an extremely metaphysical aspiration to give oneself a kind of transcendental disguise, for the mask is not simply something compensatory.”
― Kōbō Abe, The Face of Another

“The world itself, like the mask, began to seem difficult to believe in, and I was stricken with an unutterable sense of loneliness.”
― Kōbō Abe, The Face of Another

“If one clung too closely to reality, the result might well be far from realistic.”
― Kōbō Abe, The Face of Another

“What we call beauty is perhaps the strength of our feeling of resistance to destructibility. Difficulty of reproduction is the yardstick of the degree of beauty.”
― Kōbō Abe, The Face of Another

“Rather than run aimlessly away, it would be best, I suppose, to face the situation squarely and get used to it once and for all.”
― Kōbō Abe, The Face of Another

“If covering our bodies with clothes represents a cultural step forward, there is no guarantee that in the future masks will not be taken equally for granted.”
― Kōbō Abe, The Face of Another

“Being a clown would be all right, but I did not want to be a clown unaware that he was one.”
― Kōbō Abe, The Face of Another

“Lost in the crowd, it’s all right to pretend for a moment to be no one.”
― Kōbō Abe, The Face of Another

“The future is merely a function of the past. There could be no plan of action tomorrow for a mask that had been alive not yet twenty-four hours. The human social equation, in short, is, like a child, too unrestricted.”
― Kōbō Abe, The Face of Another

“The torment of imprisonment lies in not being able to escape from oneself at any time. I too was wretchedly floundering around, tightly closed into the bag of myself.”
― Kōbō Abe, The Face of Another

“When I looked at you from a distance you would smile invitingly, but when I approached, the smile would change into mist and obstruct my view.
...
It may be that someone else’s tenderness can be experienced only as pain.”
― Kōbō Abe, The Face of Another

“Suddenly you began to sob. It was an unnerving sound, like air escaping from a faucet when the water stops.”
― Kōbō Abe, The Face of Another

“I do not quite know how to put it, but I wonder if a mask, being universal, enhances our relations with others more than does the naked face.”
― Kōbō Abe, The Face of Another

“The goal does not lie in the results of research, the very process of research is itself the goal.”
― Kōbō Abe, The Face of Another

“You can't force yourself into something you can't understand, you know.”
― Kōbō Abe, The Face of Another

“What we mean when we say "terrible conditions" is conditions which we are aware of as being terrible.”
― Kōbō Abe, The Face of Another

“A strange thing the face. I never felt anything about it at any given time, but when i found i didn't have one, I felt as if half the world had been torn away from me”
― Kōbō Abe, The Face of Another