The Miner Quotes

“Novelists congratulate themselves on their creation of this kind of “character” or that kind of “character,” and readers pretend to talk knowingly about “character,” but all it amounts to is that the writers are enjoying themselves writing lies and the readers are enjoying themselves reading lies. In fact, there is no such thing as character, something fixed and final. The real thing is something that novelists don’t know how to write about. Or, if they tried, the end result would never be a novel. Real people are strangely difficult to make sense out of. Even a god would have his hands full trying.”
― Sōseki Natsume, The Miner

“Human beings are supposed to get angry now and then, they’re supposed to rebel. That’s how they’re made. Forcing yourself to become a creature that doesn’t get angry and never rebels is tantamount to happily educating yourself to be an idiot.”
― Sōseki Natsume, The Miner

“As long as you have tears to shed, you can certainly still laugh.”
― Sōseki Natsume, The Miner

“As long as a person remains conscious and retains any awareness at all, he can never lose just the awareness that he is happy.”
― Sōseki Natsume, The Miner

“Even the holiest of lights must lose some of its glory when it is reduced to a function of the real world.”
― Sōseki Natsume, The Miner

“The only way to become “normal” is to make a lot of allies and do the abnormal as though it were entirely normal. I still haven’t tried this, but I’m sure it would work.”
― Sōseki Natsume, The Miner

“When I call him a fool, I mean it only in the sense that he was just as pitiful a creature as I was, and implying the sympathy of one fool for another.”
― Sōseki Natsume, The Miner

“However bad you may feel, however great your anguish, however convinced you may be that your soul is trying to escape, your stomach empties itself out just fine.”
― Sōseki Natsume, The Miner

“Their faces, which on the way down had filled me with such loathing, now seemed like clay dolls’ heads. They were not ugly, not frightening, not hateful. They were just faces, as the face of the most beautiful woman in Japan is just a face. And I was exactly like these men, a human being of flesh and bone, entirely ordinary and entirely meaningless.”
― Sōseki Natsume, The Miner

“Don’t be scared,” Hatsu said, coughing a few times. “It’s just dynamite.”
― Sōseki Natsume, The Miner

“In other words, what happened, surely, was that I witnessed for the first time in my life the germ of all true religious feeling and, in the presence of these half-beast-half-humans, felt a genuine sense of awe. (Nonetheless, I myself still possess no religious feeling.)”
― Sōseki Natsume, The Miner

“The human heart, it seems to me after careful consideration, is like water. Push it and it gives way; pull back, and it comes flowing in.”
― Sōseki Natsume, The Miner

“They were playing it by ear, and this was all it took to be human.”
― Sōseki Natsume, The Miner

“The minute you go to sleep, time ceases to exist. Sleep”
― Natsume Sōseki, The Miner

“The darkness of the mine, the darkness of my mind: the two became one and indivisible. I did not sleep, however. Of that I'm sure. In the stillness, my consciousness became highly attenuated, that's all. But even this attenuated consciousness was one part real world in ten parts water. As diluted as I became, it never quite disappeared.”
― Natsume Sōseki, The Miner

“Forget about your old lady,” another man shouted from his place by the hearth. “He took her. She’s gone. No use groanin’ about it now. You’re the one who pawned her. When you don’t pay up, somebody else gets her. That’s the way it works.”
― Sōseki Natsume, The Miner

“Of course they’ve got women. There’s no place in the world without women.”
― Sōseki Natsume, The Miner

“What is it they say? Meet the enemy and swallow him. If you can’t swallow, be swallowed. If you can’t do either, make a clean break and keep an eye on the enemy with an attitude of independence and self-respect.”
― Sōseki Natsume, The Miner

“There are plenty of things in this world that you can despise and fear at the same time. There’s nothing contradictory about this.”
― Sōseki Natsume, The Miner

“While you’re young, you can go straight from dejection to impudence depending on the other person’s attitude.”
― Sōseki Natsume, The Miner

“On a larger scale, it’s true of this whole book. All I’m doing here is recording facts that don’t fall together. There’s no novelistic fabrication involved, so it’s not interesting the way a novel is. But it’s a lot more mysterious than a novel. Natural facts, which have been dramatized by fate, are freer of laws than a novel devised by human design. Which is why they’re mysterious. Or so I’ve always thought.”
― Sōseki Natsume, The Miner

“It seems like something that could turn into a novel, yet it never does.”
― Sōseki Natsume, The Miner

“At this rate, my book will never turn into a novel. Life is full of such events that seem as though they ought to fall into place but never do—events, I might add, that are like episodes from a badly written novel.”
― Sōseki Natsume, The Miner

“There’s no time to ask the meaning of things, no time to answer, and anyone who tries to find out is considered a great fool, so language here is extremely simple and absolutely practical.”
― Sōseki Natsume, The Miner

“I don’t know if any of you have heard the sound of a human voice without warning on a lonely road at night, but let me tell you, it can make you feel very weird.”
― Sōseki Natsume, The Miner

“You hear about people warning others not to forget what they’ve done for them in their hour of need, but of course they’re going to forget. Swearing otherwise is just a lie.”
― Sōseki Natsume, The Miner

“It’s only natural for the passive creature of yesteryear to become arrogant today. That’s just the way people are.”
― Sōseki Natsume, The Miner

“I had known the word “passive” since I was a kid, but now its meaning became clear to me for the first time in a moment of enlightenment.”
― Sōseki Natsume, The Miner

“Having read little poetry or other prettified writing, I was free of the pretensions it takes to view your own situation as a novel, to go dashing back and forth across the novelistic landscape making a great show of your pain and sorrow, all the while observing your own pitiful state from a place apart and gushing over how terribly poetic it is.”
― Sōseki Natsume, The Miner

“I was shocked to witness the boy’s casual acceptance of Chōzō’s offer, but at the same time I came to see that there were a considerable number of people on this earth who, like me, would follow wherever led, satisfied to drift along with the flow. In Tokyo, people are dizzyingly mobile, but even as they move, their roots are firmly planted.”
― Sōseki Natsume, The Miner