27 Quotes by Minae Mizumura

Perhaps when a nation goes through a period of upheaval, those who should become politicians, do.

I myself am a supporter of multilingualism, but multilingualism without a true understanding of universal language will only make us blind and ultimately ineffectual in realizing that very ideal.

In the history of humanity, there have been many languages, including French, that have served as universal languages: Latin, Chinese, Arabic, and more. Yet none of them ever ruled the world the way English does today.

Those were the good old days when educated Americans read foreign literature in translation, even works written in non-Western languages.

The year 1946 was the watershed: generations born after that were increasingly exposed to the new, poorer orthographic style and gradually became reluctant to read anything written before the changes unless it was rewritten in that style.

A strong tie binds novelists to their mother tongue. Though novelists can and do write in languages other than their own, there is a common belief that a novel has a special, almost mystical affinity with the novelist's mother tongue.

One’s identity derives not from one’s nation or blood but from the language one uses.

Inevitably, the older a woman became, the less she attracted people’s eyes; now that she could go virtually unseen, it was her turn to observe others. This was the law of a woman’s life.

The first prerequisite for fine literature is that the writer must see the language not as a transparent medium for self-expression or the representation of reality, but as a medium one must struggle with to make it do one’s bidding.