Being free always involves being lonely

“Loneliness was an unsatisfied thirst for illusion.”
― Kobo Abe, The Woman in the Dunes

“When I look at small things, I think I shall go on living: drops of rain, leather gloves shrunk by being wet...When I look at something too big, I want to die: the Diet Building, or a map of the world...”
― Kobo Abe, The Box Man

“The most frightening thing in the world is to discover the abnormal in that which is closest to us.”
― Kobo Abe

“Do you shovel to survive, or survive to shovel?”
― Kōbō Abe, The Woman in the Dunes

“One could not do without repetition in life, like the beating of the heart, but it was also true that the beating of the heart was not all there was to life.”
― Kōbō Abe, The Woman in the Dunes

“You don't need me. What you really need is a mirror. Because any stranger is for you simply a mirror in which to reflect yourself. I don't ever again want to return to such a desert of mirrors.”
― Kōbō Abe, The Face of Another

“Being free always involves being lonely.”
― Kōbō Abe

“There wasn't a single item of importance [in the newspaper]. A tower of illusion, all of it, made of illusory bricks and full of holes. If life were made up only of important things, it really would be a dangerous house of glass, scarcely to be handled carelessly. But everyday life was exactly like the headlines. And so everybody, knowing the meaninglessness of existence, sets the center of his compass at his own home.”
― Abe Kōbō, The Woman in the Dunes

“Everyone has his own philosophy that doesn't hold good for anybody else.”
― Kōbō Abe, The Woman in the Dunes

“Only the happy ones return to contentment. Those who were sad return to despair.”
― Kōbō Abe, The Woman in the Dunes

“Still, the one who best understands the significance of light is not the electrician, not the painter, not the photographer, but the man who lost his sight in adulthood. There must be the wisdom of deficiency in deficiency, just as there is the wisdom of plenty in plenty.”
― Kobo Abe, The Face of Another

“He wanted to believe that his own lack of movement had stopped all movement in the world, the way a hibernating frog abolishes winter.”
― Kōbō Abe, The Woman in the Dunes

“Suddenly a sorrow the color of dawn welled up in him. They might as well lick each other's wounds. But they would lick forever, and the wounds would never heal, and in the end their tongues would be worn away.”
― Kobo Abe

“Could having a face be such an important requirement? Was being seen the cost of the right to see?”
― Kōbō Abe, The Face of Another

“I rather think the world is like sand. The fundamental nature of sand is very difficult to grasp when you think of it in its stationary state. Sand not only flows, but this very flow is the sand.”
― Kōbō Abe, The Woman in the Dunes

“If there were no risk of a punishment, a getaway would lose the pleasure.”
― Kōbō Abe, The Woman in the Dunes

“What in heaven's name was the real essence of this beauty? Was it the precision of nature with its physical laws, or was it nature's mercilessness, ceaselessly resisting man's understanding?”
― Kōbō Abe, The Woman in the Dunes

“The fish you don't catch is always the biggest.”
― Kōbō Abe, The Woman in the Dunes

“So nothing will ever be written down again. Perhaps the act of writing is necessary only when nothing happens.”
― Kōbō Abe, The Face of Another

“The only way to go beyond work is through work. It is not that work itself is valuable; we surmount work by work. The real value of work lies in the strength of self-denial.”
― Kōbō Abe, The Woman in the Dunes

“Nothing is so awkward as a demonstration of humanity by the enemy.”
― Kōbō Abe, Secret Rendezvous

“If from the beginning you always believed that a ticket was only one-way, then you wouldn't have to try so vainly to cling to the sand like an oyster to a rock.”
― Kōbō Abe, The Woman in the Dunes

“I personally feel that a box, far from being a dead end, is an entrance to another world. I don't know to where, but an entrance to somewhere, some other world.”
― Kōbō Abe, The Box Man

“Certainly sand was not suitable for life. Yet, was a stationary condition absolutely indispensable for existence? Didn't unpleasant competition arise precisely because one tried to cling to a fixed position? If one were to give up a fixed position and abandon oneself to the movement of the sands, competition would soon stop. Actually, in the deserts flowers bloomed and insects and other animals lived their lives. These creatures were able to escape competition through their great ability to adjust--for example, the man's beetle family.

While he mused on the effect of the flowing sands, he was seized from time to time by hallucinations in which he himself began to move with the flow.”
― Kōbō Abe, The Woman in the Dunes

“It was perhaps relief and confidence stemming from the opportunity to tempt you into being my accomplice, however indirectly, in the lonely work of producing the mask. For me, whatever you may say, you are the most important "other person." No, I do not mean it in a negative sense. I meant that the one who must first restore the roadway, the one whose name I had to write on the first letter, was first on my list of "others." (Under any circumstances, I simply did not want to lose you. To lose you would be symbolic of losing the world.)”
― Kobo Abe, The Face of Another

“The suffering of being imprisoned rests in the fact that it is impossible, at any time, to escape from oneself.”
― Kōbō Abe

“In seeing there is love, in being seen there is abhorrence. One grins, trying to bear the pain of being seen. But not just anyone can be someone who only looks. If the one who is looked at looks back, then the person who was looking becomes the one who is looked at.”
― Kōbō Abe, The Box Man

“Without the threat of punishment, there is no joy in flight.”
― Kōbō Abe

“Animal smell is beyond philosophy.”
― Kōbō Abe, The Woman in the Dunes

“No matter how many faces I have, there is no changing the fact that I am me.”
― Kōbō Abe, The Face of Another