Top 200 Banana Yoshimoto Quotes (2025 Update)
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151. “I’m extremely, almost pathologically sensitive to violence, and I pick up on it immediately when something violent is happening. Most people are constantly perpetrating little acts of violence on others, even when they don’t mean to.”

— Banana Yoshimoto

152. “Il cuore di ognuno di noi stava cercando di accompagnare in modo tranquillo la vita di mia sorella che se ne andava. O meglio, si stava avvicinando a malincuore in quella direzione. Procedeva con sicurezza su quella strada, tranquillamente, come quando l’autunno avanza cedendo il passo all’inverno.”

— Banana Yoshimoto

153. “That’s because you think about everything in words... You can go around and around the same question all you like, and never find an answer. I know that’s how you cope, how you get through time, so I’ve never thought it was immature, or unhelpful. But there’s another way of doing it: to sit with an empty space, and just look at it, without thinking anything, just enduring. Some people can do that.”

— Banana Yoshimoto

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

— Banana Yoshimoto

155. “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

156. “I had a premonition of setting out on a journey and getting lost inside a distant tide as the sun went down, ending up far, far away from where I started.”

— Banana Yoshimoto

157. “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

158. “Things that don’t matter at all to one person can hurt another so deeply it seems as bad as dying.”

— Banana Yoshimoto

159. “But every time my thoughts reached this point, every time, my desire to speak would vanish. And so we remained precisely as we were, making no waves, at a standstill.”

— Banana Yoshimoto

160. “Neither of us realized what was happening. That simply by keeping an eye on each other, without giving it any thought, just by noticing the sound of a certain window sliding open, we were already starting to fall in love.”

— Banana Yoshimoto

161. “But that’s only because we have to be that way in order to get on with our lives. Just because people are playing doesn’t mean their hearts aren’t in it.”

— Banana Yoshimoto

162. “If I were really in love, I don’t think I could have said that. I probably would have tried to toy with his feelings a bit more, or maybe I would have had trouble finding the words. But all I felt then was a desire to help. And while I didn’t yet know the reason, it frightened me much more to think of him getting hurt than it did to think of someone else getting hurt.”

— Banana Yoshimoto

163. “Listen kiddo, by the time you grow up you’ll have collected a whole lot of this ‘dirt of life’ stuff, right, you won’t know where it’s coming from but it’ll pile up, and clothes and pearls won’t look as beautiful to you as they do now – that’s for sure. The problem is that dirt, see? You can’t ever settle down in one place, you’ve got to live like you’re always, always staring way off into the distance.”

— Banana Yoshimoto

164. “No matter what, I want to continue living with the awareness that I will die. Without that, I am not alive. That is what makes the life I have now possible.”

— Banana Yoshimoto

165. “If someone could give me some sort of evidence that what we’re doing here is really love, I’d be so tremendously relieved that I’d probably kneel down at that person’s feet. And if it isn’t love, if it’s eventually going to end, I want to go on sleeping like this; I want to stop hearing the phone when he calls. Let me be alone again.”

— Banana Yoshimoto

166. “Recognizing how totally ignorant you are is the only honest way to deal with people who’ve been through something traumatic.”

— Banana Yoshimoto

167. “In retrospect I realise that fate was a ladder on which, at the time, I could not afford to miss a single rung.”

— Banana Yoshimoto

168. “When people start getting depressed there’s just no end to it – things just seem to get worse and worse.”

— Banana Yoshimoto

169. “Living like that utterly convinced me of the extreme limitations of language. I was just a child then, so I had only an intuitive understanding of the degree to which one losses control of words once they are spoken or written. It was then that I first felt a deep curiosity about language, and understood it as a tool that encompasses both a single moment and eternity.”

— Banana Yoshimoto

170. “There are no rules here, except that you have to sit properly at the bar when you drink. People can tell me anything they want. Things they wouldn’t usually say, things that wouldn’t be acceptable at work – it doesn’t matter. That’s what this place is for, after all: they come and pay money to buy themselves, their innermost hearts, a bit of freedom.” She.”

— Banana Yoshimoto

171. “If you – or anyone on this train, for that matter – thought of life as a kind of train, instead of worrying only about your usual destinations, you’d be surprised how far you could go, just with the money you have in your wallet right now.”

— Banana Yoshimoto

172. “Considering how smart Nakajima was, I bet he could have found a way to express more precisely what it was like to push his body to the limit while studying, or his perspective on the way my emotions were structured inside me. He was just being nice, communicating on my level. That’s what made it sound vague.”

— Banana Yoshimoto

173. “I wished my heart would break and get it over with.”

— Banana Yoshimoto

174. “All I wanted was to get through this as quickly as possible, to see the day when memories be just memories.”

— Banana Yoshimoto

175. “When we start something new, at first it is very muddy, and clouded. But soon, it becomes a clean stream, whose flows conducts itself quietly, through spontaneous movements.”

— Banana Yoshimoto

176. “My fury was lofty, pure, cool.”

— Banana Yoshimoto

177. “For ten years I had been protected, wrapped up in something like a blanket that had been stitched together from all kinds of different things. But people never notice that warmth until after they’ve emerged. You don’t even notice that you’ve been inside until it’s too late for you ever to go back – that’s how perfect the temperature of that blanket is.”

— Banana Yoshimoto

178. “It felt like the inside of my stomach had turned completely black. Like a black hole. You could throw in anything you liked, I wouldn’t even notice – my head was drifting through the clouds – everything would just go right in, things just kept going in... I was dragging all this black stuff along behind me, it was so heavy I could barely stand.”

— Banana Yoshimoto

179. “If you’re not in love with him, you can understand him.”

— Banana Yoshimoto

180. “I’d assumed that once I’d passed the age of twenty, I’d gained the power to do everything alone. But I’d been wrong about that, and this just brought it home to me, again, that I still had a long way to go.”

— Banana Yoshimoto

181. “All the possibilities for growth seemed to be closed off for us. Like plants in a greenhouse, we depended on each other, but neither of us enjoyed the feelings of release or openness that one would wish from such a relationship. We just sat together in the dark, licking each other’s wounds and clinging together for warmth, like an old couple.”

— Banana Yoshimoto

182. “And it’s true, I thought, interesting things do happen, even in the midst of the blackest nights. And when you take a spill, you can always rise up from it with something good in your hand.”

— Banana Yoshimoto

183. “The words I read in books seemed to strike me more deeply, and with my senses sharpened by grief, I noticed the glittering transition of the seasons as clearly as if I held the grief in the palm of my hand. It had been a long while since I’d experienced a fall so clear and crisp.”

— Banana Yoshimoto

184. “We’d given up thinking about things as though we understood them, or even as though we could, and committed to living our days like a continuous length of thread we were each spinning.”

— Banana Yoshimoto

185. “It was then that I first felt a deep curiosity about language, and understood it as a tool that encompasses both a single moment and eternity.”

— Banana Yoshimoto

186. “Peace and acceptance suddenly fell into my hands. Like a patch of rich soil that had soaked up plenty of sun mounding gently up into an empty space, I felt something akin to an answer settle in me.”

— Banana Yoshimoto

187. “Floating in a dream, I watched her walk away. That she had come to me at the end of a long night of misery made me want to cry tears of joy. I wanted to tell her: “How happy I am that you came to me like an apparition in that bluish mist. Now everything around me will be a little bit better when I wake up.” At last I was able to fall asleep.”

— Banana Yoshimoto

188. “It struck me that family, work, friendships, engagements – all of these were like spiderwebs placed to protect people from the more distressing colors that lurked within themselves. The more safety nets you had under you, the less far you had to fall, and if you were lucky you might live your entire life without even noticing what was below.”

— Banana Yoshimoto

189. “I wondered whether I was crying because I was sad, or because I had just been released from my sadness.”

— Banana Yoshimoto

190. “Se anche solo per un istante pensavo di essere strana, gli occhi di mia madre mi guardavano da sopra gli occhiali, e come due puntine da disegno mi fissavano saldamente al mio posto nel mondo.”

— Banana Yoshimoto

191. “You know all the right techniques, all the secrets. You understand how to flow with time, and not get stuck in one place. Once you master one thing and have done it enough, you move on. Or at least you’re good at pretending to move on. I think most people live their lives repeating the same patterns, again and again and again.”

— Banana Yoshimoto

192. “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 isn’t really true. Periods in our lives end the way seasons change. That’s all there is to it.”

— Banana Yoshimoto

193. “At the time, I was still so shrunken into myself I couldn’t quite believe what was happening. I’d never dreamed that Mom and I could ever do anything as fun as gorging on an entire cake until our bellies ached. We weren’t being hysterical, or depressed. We’d just thought of something nice to do, and done it together. That kind of thing had felt wrong in Meguro, but the new apartment somehow made it possible.”

— Banana Yoshimoto

194. “I thought about the complications of what I’d been dealing lately. And then I understood that actually it wasn’t just the relationship- I had so much baggage from my chilhood, from before I was born into this world too. I understood that for the first time that night. And I knew it would always be that way, until we die. Even after we’re dead.”

— Banana Yoshimoto

195. “This was what it took, I realized, to be something that survived. Not just constancy, or strength. But – like the ever-flowing river – to engulf everything that came your way and move swiftly on as though it had never been.”

— Banana Yoshimoto

196. “Nothing could take away the sights that my eyes had seen, that my mind remembered, or that I lived in the very cells that made up my body. Take that, time, I thought, and squeezed my hand into a fist.”

— Banana Yoshimoto

197. “Sounds great,” I agreed. I would go out with Akira and forget, for a brief while, the sorrow that clings to life. I would pretend for a moment that my sadness might someday disappear.”

— Banana Yoshimoto

198. “It’s so great, I thought, having tea in the afternoon with someone you really feel at home with.”

— Banana Yoshimoto

199. “For one thing, I was breathing more easily than I had been even yesterday. I was sick to death at the prospect of more suffocatingly lonely nights. The idea that they would be repeated, that was just how life was, made me shudder with horror. Still, having tasted for myself that moment when I suddenly could breathe easy again made my heart beat faster.”

— Banana Yoshimoto

200. “I started out thinking I’d just have to look the part to get by, and before I knew it the poison had seeped in and changed me inside.”

— Banana Yoshimoto