Botchan Quotes
"It's true that I never have amounted to much. When you look at how things have turned out, it's no wonder that she was worried."
"It wasn't as if there was any special reason. I was just sticking my head out of a window one day, and one of my classmates started making fun of me."
"Even though she’d done so much for me, I’d never felt particularly grateful to her before, but now that I found myself on my own so far away from home I finally realized how kindhearted she’d been."
"No matter how much mischief I was involved in, I still had my honor. If you’re just going to lie your way out of the punishment afterward, well, you shouldn’t have done anything to begin with."
"If being a middle school teacher meant that you had to put up with kids like these no matter where you went, it was pretty sad."
"No matter how hard I threw the damned things, there was nothing to show for it but a gentle ripple on the mosquito netting when they hit it."
"The decent thing to do would be to go back to your beds and think it over and, once you’ve had some second thoughts, come and apologize in the morning."
"I guess it’s a job for people who are tremendously patient, and thick-skulled as well."
"Even though law students are weaklings they do have big mouths."
"If you think a bunch of grasshoppers is enough to put a scare into somebody, just you get a load of this."
"When I get myself into this kind of fix, I’m totally at a loss. But even if I’m at a loss, I’ll be damned if I’m going to be a loser."
"If you can’t win with honesty, what else is there?"
"The fact that he would go to the bother of calling on the Principal over an incident like this just shows what a faint-hearted type he was."
"No matter how stuck-up he sounded, though, it could never work with a face like that."
"I’m not any good at describing what makes a woman gorgeous, so I won’t try, but this one was definitely absolutely gorgeous."
"You think that the Porcupine is a simple, honest fellow, and then you hear that he’s been stirring up the students."
"However you look at things, you just don’t know what to believe."
"Even though nothing particularly awful had happened to me, I felt as if I had already aged a good five or six years."
"If a man isn’t as upright as a stalk of bamboo, you can’t trust him."
"Even if you get into a fight with an upright man, you’ll still have a good feeling about it."
"A guy like Redshirt – that’s the kind you’d better not trust."
"If a man like him was worthy of being the Assistant Principal, well, I must be worthy of being the President of a university."
"Nothing but brute force would do. It’s no wonder wars keep breaking out all over the world."
"If you’re going to get so excited about a bunch of twisted shrubs or bamboo, you might as well feel proud about having a hunchbacked lover or a lame husband."
"Being written about in a newspaper is like getting bitten by a snapping turtle – once it latches onto you, it won’t let go."
"If people’s apologies aren’t the real thing, you might as well think of their forgiveness as not being the real thing either."
"Even if they were schoolboys, even if they were just kids, they were already bigger than I was."