Quotes From "In The Miso Soup" By

1
But why is it that if you imagine a baby who smells of milk, for example, you can't help smiling? Why is there such an agreement around the world about what is or isn't a foul smell? Who decided what smells bad? Is it impossible that somewhere in this world there are people who, if they sat next to a homeless fellow they'd get the urge to snuggle up to him, but if they sat next to a baby they'd get an urge to kill it? . Unknown
2
But what I did sense was an emptiness like a black hole inside of him, and there was no predicting what might emerge from a place like that. Unknown
3
After listening to a lot of these stories, I began to think that American loneliness is a completely different creature from anything we experience in this country, and it made me glad I was born Japanese. The type of loneliness where you need to keep struggling to accept a situation is fundamentally different from the sort you know you'll get through if you just hang in there. Unknown
4
That was with me for years--feeling I wasn't myself. And I do think I wasn't my real self then. Of course, I'm not sure there is such a thing as a real self. You could ransack your innards looking for the real you and never find it--slice yourself open and all you'll find is blood and muscle and bone. Unknown
5
You don't know what cold is until you've experienced the cold you feel when the blood is draining out of your body. Unknown
6
When you're in an extreme situation you tend to avoid facing it by getting caught up in little details. Like a guy who's decided to commit suicide and boards a train only to become obsessed with whether he remembered to lock the door when he left home. Unknown
7
And sometimes ignorance is even harder to deal with than deliberate evil. Unknown
8
I wonder why people you have to meet have to be such liars. They lie as if their lives depended on it. Unknown
9
What makes somebody nice or unpleasant to be around is the way they communicate. When people are fucked up, their communication is fucked up. Unknown
10
They needed a reason why a little kid would commit murder, someone or something to point the finger at, and I think they were relieved when they hit upon horror movies as the culprit. But there's no reason a child commits murder, just as there's no reason a child gets lost. What would it be - because his parents weren't watching him? That's not a reason, it's just a step in the process. Unknown