69 Quotes by Kōbō Abe

You can only do what you can no matter how you try.

Something whose connection with human experience we cannot grasp is bound to be frightening.

Only man has turned away from the law of survival of the fittest, taken up the weak and ailing, and guaranteed their right to survival. So heroes perish, but the weak live on. One measure of a civilisation, in fact, is the percentage of misfits in its society. There's even a political scientist (anonymous) who claims that our modern age is an age "of the patient, by the patient, for the patient".

Do you shovel to survive, or survive to shovel?

Defeat begins with the fear that one had lost.

It would seem that marsupials are poor imitations of full-fledged mammals. Their inadequacy gives them a certain appeal; we’re touched by it.

Когда на тебя смотрят, а ты делаешь что-то гадкое — это гадкое в той же степени марает и тех, кто смотрит.

Just as trees bear their fruit before winter, just as bamboo grass produces its seeds just before it withers, sex is simply a struggle with death on the human level.

A movie’s a place where you pay your money to exchange faces for a while" [page 88].