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The world, after all, was still a place of bottomless horror. It was by no means a place of childlike simplicity where everything could be settled by a simple then-and-there decision.

Osamu Dazai

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Osamu Dazai
Age: 38 †
Born: 1909
Born: June 19
Died: 1948
Died: June 13
Author
Novelist
Writer
Tsushima Shuji
World
Decision
Simple
Means
Place
Bottomless
Stills
Childlike
Still
Settled
Everything
Simplicity
Mean
Horror

More quotes by Osamu Dazai

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All I feel are the assaults of apprehension and terror at the thought that I am the only one who is entirely unlike the rest. It is almost impossible for me to converse with other people. What should I talk about, how should I say it? - I don't know.
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People talk of “social outcasts.” The words apparently denote the miserable losers of the world, the vicious ones, but I feel as though I have been a “social outcast” from the moment I was born. If ever I meet someone society has designated as an outcast, I invariably feel affection for him, an emotion which carries me away in melting tenderness.
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Addiction is perhaps a sickness of the spirit.
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As for love . . . no, having once written that word I can write nothing more.
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Now even if I die, no one will be so grieved as to do himself bodily harm.
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The weak fear happiness itself. They can harm themselves on cotton wool. Sometimes they are wounded even by happiness
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Is it not true that no two human beings understand anything whatsoever about each other, that those who consider themselves bosom friends may be utterly mistaken about their fellow and, failing to realize this sad truth throughout a lifetime, weep when they read in the newspapers about his death?
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I have always found the female of the human species many times more difficult to understand than the male.
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To be a friend of the weak-that is the artist's point of departure as well as his ultimate goal.
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I have often felt that I would find it more complicated, troublesome and unpleasant to ascertain the feelings by which a woman lives than to plumb the innermost thoughts of an earthworm.
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Now I have neither happiness nor unhappiness.Everything passes.That is the one and only thing that I have thought resembled a truth in the society of human beings where I have dwelled up to now as in a burning hell.Everything passes.
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What is society but an individual? [] The ocean is not society it is individuals. This was how I managed to gain a modicum of freedom from my terror at the illusion of the ocean called the world.
Osamu Dazai
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I was afraid to board a streetcar because of the conductor I was afraid to enter the Kabuki Theater for fear of the usherettes standing along the sides of the red-carpeted staircase at the main entrance I was afraid to go into a restaurant because I was intimidated by the waiters furtively hovering behind me waiting for my plate to be emptied.
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Virtue and vice are concepts invented by human beings, words for a morality which human beings arbitrarily devised.
Osamu Dazai
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And I was incapable of living all by myself in those lodgings where I didn't know a soul. It terrified me to sit by myself quietly in my room. I felt frightened, as if I might be set upon or struck by someone at any moment.
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Labeled a delinquent. That's the only kind of label I want to be crucified under.
Osamu Dazai
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As long as I can make them laugh, it doesn’t matter how, I’ll be alright. If I succeed in that, the human beings probably won’t mind it too much if I remain outside their lives. The one thing I must avoid is becoming offensive in their eyes: I shall be nothing, the wind, the sky.
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But happiness is being able to hope, however faintly, for happiness. So, at least, we must believe if we are to live in the world of today.
Osamu Dazai
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Whenever I was asked what I wanted my first impulse was to answer Nothing. The thought went through my mind that it didn't make any difference, that nothing was going to make me happy.
Osamu Dazai
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Then what's a synonym for woman? Entrails. You're not very poetic, are you? Well, then, what's the antonym for entrails? Milk.
Osamu Dazai