Top 200 Banana Yoshimoto Quotes (2024 Update)
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101. “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

102. “The only thing I’d understand right from the very beginning was that our love was supported by loneliness. That neither one of us could haul ourselves up out of the deadly numbness we felt when we lay together, so silent, in darkness so isolating it seemed to shine. This was the edge of night.”

— Banana Yoshimoto

103. “It’s only natural, when two separate universes touch.”

— Banana Yoshimoto

104. “I’m talking about the lie that says you have to live a proper life, or else you’ll be ruined. I worked so hard to be respectable, because I was afraid of what would happen.”

— Banana Yoshimoto

105. “Just being myself made me terribly sad.”

— Banana Yoshimoto

106. “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

107. “Soon it would be all over. All of this would wither away, it would all disappear. We’d go our separate ways. Again and again this conviction crashed over us.”

— Banana Yoshimoto

108. “I had come to understand that despair does not necessarily result in annihilation, that one can go on as usual despite of it...”

— Banana Yoshimoto

109. “Akira often gets mad at me because he thinks I’m too nice to strangers, and cold as a fish at home. What can I do? He’s right, but that’s the way I am. I’m more enthusiastic about people I’ve just met, whom I barely know at all, than with old friends. Before the awkwardness of a new acquaintance has worn off, I’m ready to offer myself up to that person.”

— Banana Yoshimoto

110. “I should have told her at the time. I could have taken a deep breath, looked away, and forced myself to say it.”

— Banana Yoshimoto

111. “That’s what it’s like when you’re creating things. On the one hand, it really seems like you’re keeping it all moving on your own, and you can tell yourself that you’ve got inspiration raining down on you, but ultimately you can’t make anything happen on your own. I.”

— Banana Yoshimoto

112. “I got up and sprinted into the ocean, chasing my father. I’m in love with the moment when the water switches from being so cold you want to leap up into the air to something that feels just right against your skin.”

— Banana Yoshimoto

113. “Things are just things. They can’t bring back the dead. it just makes me feel better.”

— Banana Yoshimoto

114. “I used to think that people are were supposed to be more strange, and dirty, and full of all sorts of emotions, pity and nobility, with infinite layers of complications.”

— Banana Yoshimoto

115. “From the moment we met, I as a butterfly that flew into that space that was his soul, a room where the light had begun to dim.”

— Banana Yoshimoto

116. “I didn’t care whether I had gotten dressed, or what state my hair was in or anything– it didn’t matter. I felt close to him, and I’d come to regard him as just another part of the scenery.”

— Banana Yoshimoto

117. “My body knows not to respond to fake love. I guess maybe that’s what it means to have been brought up well.”

— Banana Yoshimoto

118. “I was kind of tired, I guess, of knowing people are flesh. Flesh and water.”

— Banana Yoshimoto

119. “The night glittered brilliantly then.”

— Banana Yoshimoto

120. “I spent most of my time thinking, because I didn’t have enough energy to do anything else.”

— Banana Yoshimoto

121. “When someone tells you something big, it’s like you’re taking money from them, and there’s no way it will ever go back to being the way it was. You have to take responsibility for listening.”

— Banana Yoshimoto

122. “Love is love. It doesn’t matter what kind it is.”

— Banana Yoshimoto

123. “I can’t imagine a life without a story.”

— Banana Yoshimoto

124. “I’ll wait until then – I won’t forget you. I don’t want things to end like this, only having known you during this strange time. But right now, I just can’t think about the future.”

— Banana Yoshimoto

125. “People tend to think they break up because they get tired of the person they’ve been with – that it’s someone’s decision, either yours or theirs. But this really isn’t true. Periods in our lives end the way seasons change. That’s all there is to it. Human willpower can’t change that – which means, if you look at it another way, that we might as well enjoy ourselves until that day arrives.”

— Banana Yoshimoto

126. “I had the impression that her place was near mine, but even by bus it took about twenty minutes. She lived alone in an apartment house, square and white like a block of tofu, on the edge of town.”

— Banana Yoshimoto

127. “Tutto sommato trovo stimolanti le emozioni che si provano quando si viene a contatto con modi di pensare diversi dai nostri, ho l’impressione che le mie vedute si amplino.”

— Banana Yoshimoto

128. “My fury was lofty, pure, cool. It was an emotion that none of these people, struggling so hard to impose a shape on life when life has no shape, could begin to understand.”

— Banana Yoshimoto

129. “The lake has all sorts of different faces. And so it’s always fresh.”

— Banana Yoshimoto

130. “Every time we hugged, I met words that were not words.”

— Banana Yoshimoto

131. “Be sure to keep your tummy war, try to relax, both your heart and your body, try not to get flustered. Live like a flower.”

— Banana Yoshimoto

132. “El arrepentimiento nunca llega antes.”

— Banana Yoshimoto

133. “But even in that very brief period of time I was made abundantly aware of the extent to which various things inside me had degenerated without my even knowing it. I’d always hated working, and I’d never cared much about the kinds of jobs I took or whether I had one or not or anything like that, and none of that had changed at all, it wasn’t that... it was something like guts, the ability to move on to the next thing when I had to...”

— Banana Yoshimoto

134. “Here I am playing nicely with the world, trying my best to leave things the tiniest bit better than they were, trying to fly even a little bit higher – how annoying it would be to have to go along with this crap.”

— Banana Yoshimoto

135. “Most people are constantly perpetrating little acts of violence on others, even when they don’t mean to.”

— Banana Yoshimoto

136. “When you love someone, you want to know. Even about the things that are hard for them.”

— Banana Yoshimoto

137. “Thanks so much for seeing, the first time you met us, that even though we’re like ghosts, the two of us, even though we’re not supposed to exist, we are alive.”

— Banana Yoshimoto

138. “I’ll never be able to be here again. As the minutes slide by, I move on. The flow of time is something I cannot stop. I haven’t a choice. I go. One caravan has stopped, another starts up. There are people I have yet to meet, others I’ll never see again. People who are gone before you know it, people who are just passing through. Even as we exchange hellos, they seem to grow transparent. I must keep living with the flowing river before my eyes.”

— Banana Yoshimoto

139. “That resplendent space created by a piece of fiction can really expand the width of time... Clearly there is a spot somewhere inside our heads they records that feelings we had when we read the book, and it stays with us forever.”

— Banana Yoshimoto

140. “You have to take responsibility for listening.”

— Banana Yoshimoto

141. “It helps to fight authority with authority.”

— Banana Yoshimoto

142. “It was as if his tears had nowhere to go, they were meant for god alone.”

— Banana Yoshimoto

143. “There was a real sense of comfort but at the same time it felt oddly tense. The feeling that every little things we said, these conversations, at any moment, they could stop being possible, and so they were precious, it was that feeling, and the sense of the miracle of this shared moment, here and now. Why were we so far apart, even when we are together? It was anice loneliness, like th sensation of washing your face with cold water.”

— Banana Yoshimoto

144. “As long as it had remained a mystery, I could have dealt with it – no matter how enormous a mystery it became. Now that matters had gotten more specific, my imagination began supplying smells and textures.”

— Banana Yoshimoto

145. “I have these two different images of her etched into my memory: one as this idealized mother, and the other as a sort of pressure weighing down on me – obsessive, feminine love.”

— Banana Yoshimoto

146. “In retrospect I realize that fate was a ladder on which, at the time, I could not afford to miss a single rung. To skip out on even one scene would have meant never making it to the top, although it would have been by far the easier choice. What motivated me was probably that little light still left in my half-dead heart, glittering in the darkness. Yet without it, perhaps, I might have slept better.”

— Banana Yoshimoto

147. “Whenever you get something in this world, you lose something too – that’s just the way things work.”

— Banana Yoshimoto

148. “Could it actually be true that tears help people to heal?”

— Banana Yoshimoto

149. “One of the things you lost sight of when you lived in the city was the sense of how much power an individual had.”

— Banana Yoshimoto

150. “If someone could give me some sort of evidence that what we’re doing is really love, I’d be so tremendously relieved...”

— Banana Yoshimoto