A taste of Kafka:
Quote:
|
“I stand on the end platform of the tram and am completely unsure of my footing in this world, in this town, in my family. Not even casually could I indicate any claims that I might rightly advance in any direction. I have not even any defense to offer for standing on this platform, holding on to this strap, letting myself be carried along by this tram, nor for the people who give way to the tram or walk quietly along or stand gazing into shop windows. Nobody asks me to put up a defense, indeed, but that is irrelevant.”
|
And of my other favorite author, Junchiro Tanizaki:
Quote:
“Thus Sasuke spent his later years without wife or children, and died, attended only by his pupils, on the fourteenth of October (the anniversary of Shunkin's death) in 1907, at the advanced age of eighty-two. I suppose that during the two decades in which he lived alone he created a Shunkin quite remote from the actual woman, yet more and more vivid in his mind.
It seems that when the priest Gazan of the Tenryu Temple heard the story of Sasuke's self-immolation, he praised him for the Zen spirit with which he changed his whole life in an instant, turning the ugly into the beautiful, and said that it was very nearly the act of a saint. I wonder how many of us would agree with him.”
|
And
Quote:
“On reading the last chapter of The Tale of Genji:
Today when the summer thrush
Came to sing at Heron's Nest
I crossed the Bridge of Dreams.”
|