The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With The Sea Quotes
"Each of the others in the gang felt the same way and certain that life consisted of a few simple signals and decisions; that death took root at the moment of birth and man’s only recourse thereafter was to water and tend it; that propagation was a fiction; consequently, society was a fiction too."
"If I were an amoeba, he thought, with an infinitesimal body, I could defeat ugliness. A man isn’t tiny or giant enough to defeat anything."
"A large iron anchor withstanding the corrosion of the sea and scornful of the barnacles and oysters that harass the hulls of ships, sinking polished and indifferent through heaps of broken glass, toothless combs, bottle caps, and prophylactics into the mud at harbor bottom—that was how he liked to imagine his heart."
"As soon as the noon watch was over he would shut himself up in his darkening cabin and play the record again and again until it was time for dinner."
"The total in his bankbook climbed and now he had almost two million yen in the bank, an extraordinary sum for a Second Mate."
"But as the years passed, he grew indifferent to the lure of exotic lands. He found himself in the strange predicament all sailors share: essentially he belonged neither to the land nor to the sea."
"Sometimes, as he listened to the song or hummed it, tears brimmed in his eyes, just as in the lyrics. Strange that a man with no ties should become sentimental about a 'harbor town.'"
"He wanted to talk about the sea—he might have said something like this: 'It was the sea that made me begin thinking secretly about love more than anything else; you know, a love worth dying for, or a love that consumes you.'"
"The man sets out in quest of the Grand Cause; the woman is left behind."
"Real danger is nothing more than just living."
"Happiness enough to drive a man crazy, happiness that defied description."
"There's a huge seal called 'impossibility' pasted all over this world."
"No adult is going to be able to do something we couldn't do."
"Living creates [fear and uncertainty]. And society is basically meaningless."
"At sea were only watches linking night and day, prosaic tedium, the wretched circumstances of a prisoner."
"The smooth, inflamed play of their lips altered subtly with every contact and clinging release."
"The fragrance of her perfume rose above the low droning of mosquitoes: Ryuji was anguished, unaware of time and place."
"The long kiss plunged them into private pools of sensation."
"But after thinking it over, Noboru erased the third count. It was obviously a contradiction of the first two, which were aesthetic, idealistic, and therefore objective value judgments."
"The smell of peppermint made a purity of his rage."
"He squeezed a mountain of toothpaste onto his brush and belabored his mouth until the gums bled."
"Gradually the pupil strained open and he discerned around the brass bedsteads a glimmer of light, a wisp of brightness hardly more than a trace of mold."
"The room as a whole, feverish with a vestige of the noon heat, was as black as the inside of a large coffin."
"Racing back to the car, Noboru drummed on the window: he had spotted Ryuji standing near the windlass in the ship’s prow."
"The concrete pier trapped the heat and hurled it back as a scorching glare; the light breeze blowing off the water brought no relief."
"The waves advanced in tiers, flank blending subtly with azure flank until it seemed that this endlessly repeated pattern was all they could see as they gazed at the water."
"The sun was just above the warehouse roofs, setting fire to the western sky and searing shadow images of king posts and mushroom ventilators into the dazzling white steel of the bridge."
"The Rakuyo was transformed into an illusory phantom as angles altered from one instant to the next."
"A prerequisite of any marriage, she began, was an investigation by a private detective agency."
"Though she didn’t imagine there was any cause for worry in this case, there was always the possibility that a sailor might have an ugly disease."
"It would be a bad mistake to allow Ryuji to remain idle any longer."
"Yoriko pressed each point home firmly but with patience, as if she were trying to persuade a child."
"From that moment Fusako loathed the actress, and her hatred was charged with the indignation of an honest, respectable bourgeois."
"Fusako didn’t notice that the position she was taking in her rage was a contradiction of that violent summer passion."
"If Ryuji were really an opportunist with all kinds of dreadful secrets, I would never have fallen in love with him."
"Ordinarily, Fusako would have considered going to a private detective agency an inauspicious beginning."
"Ryuji’s slavish hands, the hands of a father puttering over carpentry of a Sunday afternoon, would close forever the narrow access to that unearthly brilliance which he himself had once revealed."
"All six of us are geniuses. And the world, as you know, is empty."
"Permitting is our special privilege and if we felt any pity at all we wouldn’t be able to permit this ruthlessly."
"When a gear slips out of place it’s our job to force it back into position."
"We are guards, and more than that because we also have executive power to insure that order is maintained."
"Acts of juveniles less than fourteen years of age are not punishable by law."
"This law is the adults’ way of expressing the high hopes they have for us."
"If we don’t act now we will never again be able to obey freedom’s supreme command, to perform the deed essential to filling the emptiness of the world."
"Living like squealing mice. And someday we’ll get married, and have kids, and finally we’ll become fathers, the vilest things on earth!"
"The water, with spring still far away, was Prussian blue except where the shadow of one pearly cloud turned it pale, chilly white."
"The sea made Ryuji feel that he had been away from it a long, long time."