Top 200 Banana Yoshimoto Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “Fate is a ladder on which you cannot afford to miss a single rung. To skip out on even one step would mean you’ll never make it to the top.”

— Banana Yoshimoto

52. “Every time I look into his eyes I just want to take the ice cream or whatever I’ve got in my hand and rub it into his face. That’s how much I like him.”

— Banana Yoshimoto

53. “It takes time to get to know people, let alone to tell whether you like each other, so it really makes me wonder, you know, what you’re supposed to do if they just keep coming through like a revolving door, in one day and out another, and you don’t even have time to figure out who they are?”

— Banana Yoshimoto

54. “Even when I try to stir myself up, I just get irritated because I can’t make anything come out. And in the middle of the night I lie here thinking about all this. If I don’t get back on track somehow, I’m dead, that’s the sense I get. There isn’t a single strong emotion inside me.”

— Banana Yoshimoto

55. “When I’m dead worn out, in a reverie, I often think that when it comes time to die, I want to breathe my last in a kitchen. Whether it’s cold and I’m all alone, or somebody’s there and it’s warm, I’ll stare death fearlessly in the eye. If it’s a kitchen, I’ll think, ‘How good.”

— Banana Yoshimoto

56. “That’s the advantage of insomnia. People who go to be early always complain that the night is too short, but for those of us who stay up all night, it can feel as long as a lifetime. You get a lot done.”

— Banana Yoshimoto

57. “I wonder what it felt to move to a country where you didn’t grow up. I had thought about that often since my sister got married. Do you become a character in a story native to that land, or do you, somewhere in your heart, want to return to your homeland.”

— Banana Yoshimoto

58. “From the bottom of my heart, I wanted to give up; I wanted to give up on living. There was no denying that tomorrow would come, and the day after tomorrow, and so next week, too. I never thought it would be this hard, but I would go on living in the midst of a glomy depression, and that made me feel sick to the depths of my soul. In spite of the tempest raging within me, I walked the night path calmly.”

— Banana Yoshimoto

59. “When my grandmother died, time died, too, in this apartment.”

— Banana Yoshimoto

60. “I love feeling the rhythm of other people’s lives. It’s like traveling.”

— Banana Yoshimoto

61. “No matter how dreamlike a love I have found myself in, no matter how delightfully drunk I have been, in my heart I was always aware that my family consisted of only one other person. The space that cannot be filled, no matter how cheerfully a child and an old person are living together – the deathly silence that, panting in a corner of the room, pushes its way in like a shudder. I felt it very early, although no one told me about it.”

— Banana Yoshimoto

62. “It was at once a miracle and the most natural thing in the world.”

— Banana Yoshimoto

63. “Sooner or later people are definitely going to give up if you don’t give them back as much as they’re giving you.”

— Banana Yoshimoto

64. “It occurred to me that if I were a ghost, this ambiance was what I’d miss most: the ordinary, day-to-day bustle of the living. Ghosts long, I’m sure, for the stupidest, most unremarkable things.”

— Banana Yoshimoto

65. “Parting and death are both terribly painful. But to keep nursing the memory of a love so great you can’t believe you’ll ever love again is a useless drain on a woman’s energies.”

— Banana Yoshimoto

66. “We all believe we can choose our own path from among the many alternatives. But perhaps it’s more accurate to say that we make the choice unconsciously. I think I did- but now I knew it, because now I was able to put it into words. But I don’t mean this in the fatalistic sense; we’re constantly making choices. With the breaths we take every day, with the expression in our eyes, with the daily actions we do over and over, we decide as though by instinct.”

— Banana Yoshimoto

67. “Pensai che la gentilezza disinteressata delle persone, le loro parole spassionate, fossero come un abito di piume. Avvolta da quel tepore, finalmente libera dal peso che mi aveva oppresso fino a quel momento, la mia anima stava fluttuando nell’aria con grande gioia.”

— Banana Yoshimoto

68. “I was happy. I loved the night, I loved t so much it almost hurt. In the night everything seemed possible. I wasn’t sleepy at all.”

— Banana Yoshimoto

69. “It was so gorgeous it almost felt like sadness.”

— Banana Yoshimoto

70. “Love is the kind of thing that’s already happening by the time you notice it, that’s how it works, and no matter how old you get, that doesn’t change. Except that you can break it up into two entirely distinct types – love where there’s an end in sight and love where there isn’t.”

— Banana Yoshimoto

71. “His smile was so bright as he stood in my doorstep that I zoomed in for a closeup on his pupils. I couldn’t take my eyes off him. I think I heard a spirit call my name.”

— Banana Yoshimoto

72. “We’ve been very lonely, but we had it easy. Because death is so heavy – we, too young to know about it, couldn’t handle it. After this you and I may end up seeing nothing but suffering, difficulty and ugliness, but if only you’ll agree to it, I want for us to go on to more difficult places, happier places, what ever comes, together. I want you to make the decision after you’re completely better, so take your time thinking about it. In the mean time, though, don’t disappear on me.”

— Banana Yoshimoto

73. “Maybe I had been waiting for this. Maybe all I had been hoping for was a bed in which to be able to stop thinking, just for a little while, about what happened before and what would happen in the future. I was too sad to be able to sleep in the same bed with anyone; that would only make the sadness worse.”

— Banana Yoshimoto

74. “Hay cosas tan duras que dan ganas de apartar la vista. Ni siquiera el amor puede salvarte de todo.”

— Banana Yoshimoto

75. “I held the feeling in my heart; the urge to discuss it died out. There was all the time in the world. In the endless repetition of other nights, other mornings, this moment, too, might become a dream.”

— Banana Yoshimoto

76. “We ran into lots of old friends. Friends from elementary school, junior high school, high school. Everyone had matured in their own way, and even as we stood face to face with them they seemed like people from dreams, sudden glimpses through the fences of our tangled memories. We smiled and waved, exchanged a few words, and then walked on in our separate directions.”

— Banana Yoshimoto

77. “Me, when I’m utterly exhausted by it all, when my skin breaks out, on those lonely evenings when I call my friends again and again and nobody’s home, then I despise my own life – my birth, my upbringing, everything.”

— Banana Yoshimoto

78. “With a cold” – she spoke evenly, lowering her eyes a little – “now is the hardest time. Maybe even harder than dying. But this is probably as bad as it can get. You might come to fear the next time you get a cold; it will be as bad as this, but if you just hold steady, it won’t be. For the rest of your life. That’s how it works. You could take the negative view and live in fear: Will it happen again? But it won’t hurt so much if you just accept it as a part of life.” With that she looked up at me, smiling.”

— Banana Yoshimoto

79. “When you’ve fallen in love, broken up, lost a love one, and start getting older, everything seems the same. I couldn’t tell what was good and what was bad, what was better and what was worse. I simply didn’t want to have any more bad memories. I wished that time could stop, and summer will never come to an end. I felt vulnerable.”

— Banana Yoshimoto

80. “Okay,′ I said, and waving, we parted. The feeling traveled to some infinitely distant place and disappeared.”

— Banana Yoshimoto

81. “I wanted to strip and dance naked in front of them, because maybe then I could have demolished the fake, slimy atmosphere they had created.”

— Banana Yoshimoto

82. “When there’s a plus, there’s always a minus. If there’s a powerful light, the darkness that is its opposite will be just as strong.”

— Banana Yoshimoto

83. “You don’t necessarily have to want to become an adult; it happens as a matter of course, as you go, making choices. The important thing, I think, is to choose for yourself. Standing.”

— Banana Yoshimoto

84. “You might come to fear the next time you get a cold; it will be as bad as this, but if you just hold steady, it won’t be. For the rest of your life. That’s how it works. You could take the negative view and live in fear: Will it happen again? But it won’t hurt so much if you just accept it as a part of life.”

— Banana Yoshimoto

85. “I wanted to hold everything in place with my thin little arm and weak spirit. I wanted to do what I could with my unreliable body to try and deal with the many scary things that were going to start happening from now on. I wanted to try.”

— Banana Yoshimoto

86. “I know just how slimy people can be, and how people like that are during the daytime. They don’t get slimy at night because they’re drunk, they get slimy because they’re already slimy to begin with. I.”

— Banana Yoshimoto

87. “He was quiet in the way people are when they believe the world would get along just fine without them.”

— Banana Yoshimoto

88. “They could smile back and forth without speaking, like soldiers who had fought side by side. The.”

— Banana Yoshimoto

89. “As people we narrowly get by with our lives each day, energy from our soft, delicate actions appearing like cherry blossoms, only once, and once for a short while. Eventually petals fall to the ground.”

— Banana Yoshimoto

90. “There are many days when all the awful things that happen make you sick at heart, when the path before you is so steep you can’t bear to look. Not even love can rescue a person from that. Still, enveloped in the twilight coming from the west, there she was, watering the plants with her slender, graceful hands, in the midst of a light so sweet it seemed to form a rainbow in the transparent water she poured.”

— Banana Yoshimoto

91. “Begitulah, tapi kalau manusia sama sekali tidak pernah merasa putus asa, kita tidak akan tahu bagian mana dari diri kita yang tidak sanggup kita singkirkan. Lalu kita akan tumbuh dewasa tanpa benar-benar mengerti apa saja yang bisa membuat kita gembira. Aku bahagia karena bisa menderita.”

— Banana Yoshimoto

92. “In places where a loved one has died, time stops for eternity.”

— Banana Yoshimoto

93. “My way of looking at the world is so nearsighted. If no one said anything, I’d probably just live like I do now year in and year out, and feel complacent about everything around me. Plus, I don’t see that many people. Something is definitely missing – I don’t know what, maybe compassion for people who are suffering, a sense of adventure, interest in other people...”

— Banana Yoshimoto

94. “Even if this night we were spending together and everything else was just going to disappear into the past, that was all right – and it seemed to me that I held this alrightness preciously in my hands, and that it was glittering there.”

— Banana Yoshimoto

95. “May the memory of this moment, here, the glowing impression of the two of us facing each other in this warm, bright place drinking lovely hot tea, help save him, even a little bit.”

— Banana Yoshimoto

96. “In places where a loved one has died, time stops for eternity. If I stand on the very spot, one says to oneself, like a prayer, might I feel the pain he felt? They say that on a visit to an old castle or whatever, the history of the place, the presence of people who walked there many years ago, can be felt in the body. Before, when I heard things like that, I would think, what are they talking about? But i felt I understood it now.”

— Banana Yoshimoto

97. “Her eyes were those of someone who’s just fallen in love, someone who sees nothing but her lover, someone who has no fear of anything. The eyes of someone who believes that every dream will come true, that reality will move if you just give it a push.”

— Banana Yoshimoto

98. “There are many days when all the awful things that happen make you sick at heart, when the path before you is so steep you can’t bear to look. Not even love can rescue a person from that.”

— Banana Yoshimoto

99. “When things get really bad, you take comfort in the placeness of a place.”

— Banana Yoshimoto

100. “Perhaps it’s because she spends all her time sleeping – she comes and goes just as she pleases in the world of her dreams, she’s free to go anywhere she wants. And that gives her access to much more information than people have who are up all the time.”

— Banana Yoshimoto