Osamu Dazai Quotes

Addiction is perhaps a sickness of the spirit.

The thought of dying has never bothered me, but getting hurt, losing blood, becoming crippled and the like—no thanks.

I despised him as one fit only for amusement, a man with whom I associated for that sole purpose.

Item. A hand in plaster. This was the right hand of Venus. A hand like a dahlia blossom, a pure white hand, mounted on a stand. But if you looked at it carefully you could tell how this pure white, delicate hand, with whorl-less finger tips and unmarked palms, expressed, so pitifully that even the beholder was stabbed with pain, the shame intense enough to make Venus stop her breath; in the gesture was implicit the moment when Venus' full nakedness was seen by a man, when she twisted away her body, flushed all over with the prickling warmth of her shock, the whirlwind of her shame, and the tragedy of her nudity. Unfortunately, this was only a piece of bric-à-brac. The clerk valued it at fifty sen.

Spread my usual smokescreen of farce.

One of my tragic flaws is the compulsion to add some sort of embellishment to every situation—a quality which has made people call me at times a liar—but I have almost never embellished in order to bring myself any advantage; it was rather that I had a strangulating fear of that cataclysmic change in the atmosphere the instant the flow of a conversation flagged, and even when I knew that it would later turn to my disadvantage, I frequently felt obliged to add, almost inadvertently, my word of embellishment, out of a desire to please born of my usual desperate mania for service. This may have been a twisted form of my weakness, an idiocy, but the habit it engendered was taken full advantage of by the so-called honest citizens of the world.

I want to love everyone', I thought, almost tearfully. If you stare at the sky, it changes little by little. Gradually it turns bluish. [..] I had never seen anything as beautiful as the translucent leaves and grass. Gently, I reached out to the touch of the grass.

I should have died sooner. But there was one thing: Mama's love. When I thought of that I couldn't die. It's true, as I have said, that just as man has the right to live as he chooses, he has the right to die when he pleases, and yet as long as my mother remained alive, I felt that the right to death would have to be left in abeyance, for to exercise it would have meant killing her too.

It is only too obvious that favoritism inevitably exists: it would have been useless to complain to human beings. So I said nothing of the truth.

What frightened me was the logic of the world; in it lay the foretaste of something incalculably powerful. Its mechanism was incomprehensible, and I could not possibly remain closeted in that windowless, bone-chilling room. Though outside lay the sea of irrationality, it was far more agreeable to swim in its waters until presently I drowned.

God, I ask you. Is trustfulness a sin?

Just because a person has a title doesn't make him an aristocrat. Some people are great aristocrats who have no other title than the one that nature has bestowed on them, and others like us, who have nothing but titles, are closer to being pariahs than aristocrats.

It was only natural for Yozo to vacillate when asked about the reason behind his suicide – it was everything to him.

A life free of lies! Ah, but that, too, was, by definition, a lie. Surely a lie already dwelled in the heart of anyone who sought to make such distinctions and stand in judgment.

I am convinced that those people whom the world considers good and respects are all liars and fakes. I do not trust the world. My only ally is the tagged dissolute. The tagged dissolute. That is the only cross on which I wish to be crucified. Though ten thousand people criticize me, I can throw in their teeth my challenge: Are you not all the more dangerous for being without tags?