"Oh, to be laughed at when I have the courage to speak my heart. I don't want to live in a world like this." -from "Diary of My Sixteenth Year" - Yasunari Kawabata

I gave myself up to my tears. It was as though my head had turned to clear water, it was falling pleasantly away drop by drop; soon nothing would remain.

Her manner was as though she were talking of a distant foreign literature. There was something lonely, something sad in it, something that rather suggested a beggar who has lost all desire.

"Humankind, with its long history, is by now a corpse bound to a tree with the ropes of convention. If the ropes were cut, the corpse would simply fall to the ground. Prayer in one's mother tongue is a manifestation of that pathetic state."

-from "A Prayer in the Mother Tongue"