A Man Quotes

“it’s not as if you love someone once and that’s it. You renew your love again and again over the long haul, through everything that happens along the way.”
― Keiichirō Hirano, A Man

“The dead cannot call out to us. All they can do is wait for us to call to them. Except for the dead whose names are unknown. Uncalled by anyone, they sink ever deeper into solitude.”
― Keiichirō Hirano, A Man

“There is a certain kind of loneliness that can only be soothed by finding yourself within the tale of another’s trauma.”
― Keiichirō Hirano, A Man

“But the result is that I’m able to get in touch with my life indirectly through someone else’s. And I’m able to think about the things that I need to think about. There’s no way for me to do this directly. My body rejects it every time I try. That’s why I said it’s sort of like reading a novel. No one can deal with their suffering on their own. We all seek someone else to be the conduit for our emotions.”
― Keiichirō Hirano, A Man

“It’s unbearable to have your identity summed up by one thing and one thing only and for other people to have control over what that is.”
― Keiichirō Hirano, A Man

“Love for another might remain the same love even as it keeps on changing. Or perhaps we can go further and say that love persists precisely because it changes.”
― Keiichirō Hirano, A Man

“Could mendacious sincerity, consummately performed, be the ultimate deception?”
― Keiichirō Hirano, A Man

“I keep myself together by living other people’s pain,” he said eventually with an indescribably lonesome smile. “It’s like the expression ‘the man who goes mummy hunting ends up a mummy himself . . .’ Do you understand what it’s like to be honest through lies?”
― Keiichirō Hirano, A Man

“When he left the store, she said thank you for the second time and, with her eyes on his back as he walked away, inexplicably sensed a life teeming with stories that needed to be told.”
― Keiichirō Hirano, A Man

“we need to reject the idea that it is acceptable to kill in extreme cases. It may not be easy, but I believe that that is what we should be aiming for. Offenders will surely never be forgiven, but the state should bear the blame for the social conditions underlying their crimes and take responsibility by providing substantial support to the victims, instead of feigning innocence and pandering to punitive sentiments. Whatever policy is chosen, my view is that the state must never descend to the same ethical lows as the evil of murder”
― Keiichirō Hirano, A Man

“when the love for her husband had been deepest, the distance between them smallest. With no one else there, no room for mistaking the other, no need to distinguish them from anyone else,”
― Keiichirō Hirano, A Man

“For a person to be appropriate to serve as such a model, he or she needs to be highly out of the ordinary while possessing something that might be seen as a kind of template for humanity or for the age and must be purified via fiction until they reach the dimension of the symbol.”
― Keiichirō Hirano, A Man

“That was enough music for him, for he felt both his inner and outer worlds grow placid while maintaining their separateness.”
― Keiichirō Hirano, A Man

“There’s a painting by René Magritte entitled Not to Be Reproduced in which a man with his back turned is looking into a mirror at the back of another version of himself inside the mirror, who is likewise looking into the depths of the reflection.”
― Keiichirō Hirano, A Man

“he lived in constant danger of being crushed between the past and the future, between his need to suffer for his father’s sins and his terror of recapitulating them.”
― Keiichirō Hirano, A Man

“How peculiar that she saw her son every day but had only succeeded in drawing closer to him through a book.”
― Keiichirō Hirano, A Man

“Misfortune can visit itself upon anyone.”
― Keiichirō Hirano, A Man

“He or she would need countless such anonymous acts of goodwill to safely enter the world and grow up. And he found it comforting to know that he had been able to offer one of them.”
― Keiichirō Hirano, A Man

“Her moorings to the world came loose, time slipping by insensibly around her.”
― Keiichirō Hirano, A Man

“And yet, the sort of major misfortune for which once is plenty, sadly, has something in common with the stray dog that persistently chases the same person around, twice and then thrice.”
― Keiichirō Hirano, A Man

“Novelists, whether consciously or unconsciously, are always on the lookout for people that can serve as models for their novels.”
― Keiichirō Hirano, A Man

“I admit that my concern for society is in some sense hollow and reminiscent of some goody-two-shoes A-student trying to show off to his teacher, just as you impugn it to be. But part of it also derives from innate compassion that your point fails to take account of. Trying to work out the degree to which my actions arise from sincerity and the degree to which they are merely a pretense to virtue would be a fruitless exercise.”
― Keiichirō Hirano, A Man

“The problem now was not who he was in the present but who he’d been in the past, and the solution he sought was no longer supposed to help him live but to help him figure out what sort of person to die as.”
― Keiichirō Hirano, A Man

“human beings never desire others one-on-one but develop an attraction for someone because there is a rival that wants them too.”
― Keiichirō Hirano, A Man

“It’s an ill bird that fouls its own nest.”
― Keiichirō Hirano, A Man

“It’s unbearable to have your identity summed up by one thing and one thing only and for other people to have control over what that is.” “That is so true!”
― Keiichirō Hirano, A Man

“But the result is that I’m able to get in touch with my life indirectly through someone else’s. And I’m able to think about the things that I need to think about.”
― Keiichirō Hirano, A Man

“He’d then had a run-in with X and”
― Keiichirō Hirano, A Man

“The truth was, Kido had grown tired of his own hypersensitivity to prejudice. In the past, he had always shrugged off the occasional intolerant sentiments expressed by those around him as some kind of mistake. Now he almost wished he could still be so blithe.”
― Keiichirō Hirano, A Man

“Since Kido had been following her Instagram-linked Facebook feed, he had a general sense of her recent activities.”
― Keiichirō Hirano, A Man