242 Quotes About Japanese

A faint tear wet Meiko's eye, so slight a bit of moisture that it passed unseen by Yasuko. Yet all the anguish of which she never spoke was compressed into that single drop

Calligraphy is an art form that uses ink and a brush to express the very souls of words on paper.

Words are not meant to stir the air only: they are capable of moving greater things.

Toyohiko Kagawa, famed for his ministry to slum-dwellers, paid tribute to all three of Japan's major religious traditions. 'I am grateful for Shinto, for Buddhism, and for Confucianism,' he wrote. To Shinto he attributed his spirit of reverence; to Buddhism, his craving for transcendent values, including compassion and selflessness; to Confucianism, his efforts to follow the golden mean of humaneness and harmony in society. Kagawa saw Christ in the priestly robes of all these religions.

Sometimes fate is like a small sandstorm that keeps changing directions. You change direction but the sandstorm chases you. You turn again, but the storm adjusts. Over and over you play this out, like some ominous dance with death just before dawn. Why? Because this storm isn't some­ thing that blew in from far away, something that has nothing to do with you. This storm is you. Something inside of you.

Otaku (おた) is also a formal way of saying "you". た means "house", and with the honorific お, it literally means "your honorable house", implying that you are less of a person and more of a place, fixed in space and contained under a roof. Makes sense that the stereotype of the modern otaku is a shut-in, an obsessed loner and social isolate who rarely leaves his house.

I'm sorry, mom. I have some bad news. I guess I messed up somehow, somewhere along the way. I didn't manage to become a princess. I became a fujoshi instead.

If our life did not fade and vanish like the dews of Adashino’s graves or the drifting smoke from Toribe’s burning grounds, but lingered on for ever, how little the world would move us. It is the ephemeral nature of things that makes them wonderful.

大切なものが話しているはしから次々と消えてしまう。なくなってしまう。そして、輪郭しか残ってないのに安心してしまう。そういう気がする。