The ideal teacher student relationship exists when the student is bett — Kenzaburō Ōe

"To talk of prayer after admitting he professed no faith was, in my opinion, a breach of common courtesy. In this sense, he did make a social blunder, for which I think he well deserved some minor castigation."

"Now I was just a transient in the valley, a one-eyed passerby too fat for his years, and life there had the power to summon up neither the memory nor the illusion of any other, truer self. As a passerby I had a right to insist on my identity."

"If any suffering was fruitless it was the agony of a hangover; what he suffered now could not expiate suffering of any other kind."

"The destination of the soul: this is what I, led on by Nils Holgersson, came to seek in the literature of Western Europe. I fervently hope that my pursuit, as a Japanese, of literature and culture will, in some small measure, repay Western Europe for the light it has shed upon the human condition."

"It takes a person of great care and insight to watch for any abnormality in the green grass even while it grows abundantly and healthily."

"Understanding comes hard to persons of high rank who are accustomed to phony lifestyles that involve no daily work."