Top 40 Natsuo Kirino Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “Friends are a weird thing. It seems like they know all about you, but then they don’t understand you at all.”

— Natsuo Kirino

2. “For a girl, appearance can be a powerful form of oppression. No matter how intelligent a girl may be, no matter her many talents, these attributes are not easily discerned. Brains and talent will never stand up against a girl who is clearly physically attractive.”

— Natsuo Kirino

3. “I’m this superphilosophical kind of person. Stuck in a prison of abstract ideas and overpowering emotions, I have this personality that makes it really hard to survive.”

— Natsuo Kirino

4. “Let’s face it: the world is twisted. And rotten.”

— Natsuo Kirino

5. “I was in a self-induced depression. Welcome to me Real World.”

— Natsuo Kirino

6. “I’m still afraid of being totally honest. I’m more afraid of this than dying.”

— Natsuo Kirino

7. “If people can’t stand being alone, they have no choice but to die.”

— Natsuo Kirino

8. “The pain of being treated like a mere object. And a sense that this pain would turn into pleasure.”

— Natsuo Kirino

9. “Kids lose their trust in the parents they love, but still accept them, so they end up not trusting themselves anymore.”

— Natsuo Kirino

10. “Loneliness. Sometimes that awful feeling causes you to do something stupid.”

— Natsuo Kirino

11. “When stones lying warm in the sun were turned over, they exposed the cold, damp earth underneath; and that was where Masako had burrowed deep. There was no trace of warmth in this dark earth, yet for a bug curled up tight in it, it was a peaceful and familiar world.”

— Natsuo Kirino

12. “A woman who does not know herself has no choice other than to live with other people’s evaluations. But no one can adapt perfectly to public opinion. And herein lies the source of their destruction.”

— Natsuo Kirino

13. “The living mourn the dead for a time but they forget about them as days pass. The living are so selfish, so spoilt, so taken with the very act of living that they don’t remember long.”

— Natsuo Kirino

14. “In order to induce the process of decay, water is necessary. I think that, in the case of women, men are the water.”

— Natsuo Kirino

15. “All I want is for someone to understand me before I die. With death staring me in the face, I finally understand the reason novelists write books: before they die they want somebody, somewhere, to understand them.”

— Natsuo Kirino

16. “I was frightened by the optimism of adults, their stupid trust in science to treat a troubled heart. Afraid of their obsession with believing they have to treat troubled kids. I just wanted them to leave me alone, so how come they didn’t get it? But that’s the way it always is.”

— Natsuo Kirino

17. “I suppose I’m the one responsible for destroying myself.”

— Natsuo Kirino

18. “She couldn’t live her life as someone’s prisoner the way he had lived his, caught up in a dream of the past, with no way forward and no way back, forced to dig down inside oneself.”

— Natsuo Kirino

19. “The thing we are most proud of and the thing we are most ashamed of are but the front and back of the same coin. They torture and thrill all at once.”

— Natsuo Kirino

20. “Her beauty was not like that of a bonsai, which achieves its charm by asserting its own will in defiance of the careful bindings that lash and restrict it. How, I wondered, would my grandfather describe Mitsuru’s beauty?”

— Natsuo Kirino

21. “My talent was the uncompromising ability to feel spite.”

— Natsuo Kirino

22. “When high school girls like us freak out, people are always able to overpower us before we do something stupid, like hijacking a bus or running around with a knife. Which is why girls arm themselves beforehand so they don’t get caught up in something like that. Boys probably aren’t so good at protecting themselves.”

— Natsuo Kirino

23. “I looked at Yuriko’s face and was horrified. I had never seen her look more beautiful. She was almost godlike. It was the first time I had ever had that experience. She seemed to be more an effigy than a human being, too beautiful to be a creature of this world.”

— Natsuo Kirino

24. “And what if, in order to keep on living, I have to continue to accept myself?”

— Natsuo Kirino

25. “I decided then and there I was never going to have kids.”

— Natsuo Kirino

26. “It seems in the final analysis that people who get involved in religion are only after their own personal happiness.”

— Natsuo Kirino

27. “I realized that the last thing I wanted to do was go home. A weird feeling – like on the one hand I wanted to go back to that other world, but at the same time didn’t care if my connections to it were cut forever. It wasn’t a feeling of being free or anything. I just didn’t want to go back. I wanted to float somewhere in between.”

— Natsuo Kirino

28. “Fortune may shine brightly on a woman like that, but the shadow cast is long and dark.”

— Natsuo Kirino

29. “My father and mother fed my sister and me on a diet of romantic dreams just as though they were giving us candy. Gradually the dreams wore thin, until in the end they wasted away to nothing.”

— Natsuo Kirino

30. “It wasn’t so much that I was afraid of the place itself, but I was afraid of the creatures who masqueraded as people. And I became afraid of myself for stirring up such hatred in others.”

— Natsuo Kirino

31. “Kazue’s journals depict an absolutely sublime struggle, the struggle between an individual and the rest of the world. Kazue lost the battle, ended up completely alone, and died hungry for some measure of kindness from another person. Don’t you think it’s a sad story?”

— Natsuo Kirino

32. “It wasn’t so much that I was afraid of the place itself, but I was afraid of the creatures who masqueraded as people.”

— Natsuo Kirino

33. “It gave me a great deal of pleasure, as I have already said, to indulge in these fantasies. I would join clubs, make friends, and live an ordinary life like any other ordinary person. But reality tore these dreams to shreds.”

— Natsuo Kirino

34. “You see, natural beauty creates such excitement that the existence of the weight is negated. And once it is negated, the heavier it is to bear.”

— Natsuo Kirino

35. “To live and imagine. That’s the job left for those of us who’ve survived.”

— Natsuo Kirino

36. “Mitsuru and Yuriko and Kazue didn’t mutate; they simply decayed. A biology professor certainly ought to be able to recognize the signs of fermentation and decay. Isn’t he the one who taught us all about these processes in organisms? In order to induce the process of decay, water is necessary. I think that, in the case of women, men are the water.”

— Natsuo Kirino

37. “You have to be careful, Terauchi always warned us, or you’ll wind up in some database. Then adults will control you.”

— Natsuo Kirino

38. “Karl wasn’t interested in me; neither was Johnson. But Kijima’s father liked me for who I was. The realization left me feeling numb. I was touched. But being touched is not the same as feeling desire. And I didn’t exist without desire. If I didn’t exist, then what?”

— Natsuo Kirino

39. “I was afraid of the creatures who masqueraded as people.”

— Natsuo Kirino

40. “Our gods did not come to us in any specific form, but we held them in our hearts and understood them in our own way.”

— Natsuo Kirino

41. “I clearly wasn’t in the inner circle, nor was I a member of the orbiters. I wasn’t sure if I even fit into the category of outsider. Then was I even lower than garbage? Was it my lot in life to stand forever on heaven’s shores watching the glittering swirl of celestial bodies on the other side?”

— Natsuo Kirino

42. “Here was a man who wanted what no one had wanted before: he wanted to get to know the inner workings of the doll-like woman who was me. Karl wasn’t interested in me; neither was Johnson. But Kijima’s father liked me for who I was. The realization left me feeling numb. I was touched. But being touched is not the same as feeling desire. And I didn’t exist without desire. If I didn’t exist, then what?”

— Natsuo Kirino

43. “I got up on time this morning, boarded the train, changed to the subway, and worked like an aggressive career woman in one of the biggest corporations around. At night I transformed into a prostitute sought out by men. Suddenly I remembered the argument I had had earlier with Arai and stopped short. I’m a company employee day and night. Or is it that I’m a prostitute night and day? Which is it? Which one is me?”

— Natsuo Kirino

44. “Strange that she’d never known she had such cruelty inside.”

— Natsuo Kirino

45. “The words I speak, the phrases I weave together, are born from the very emotions I embody.”

— Natsuo Kirino

46. “What are you good at?” “Nothing at all,” I said. “Just like me, then.”

— Natsuo Kirino

47. “You may think I’m crazy, but I don’t feel like I’ve done anything wrong. He deserved to die, so I’ve decided to pretend that he just went off somewhere instead of coming home tonight.”

— Natsuo Kirino

48. “In the end the three of them were so completely estranged that it was hard to understand why they even lived together.”

— Natsuo Kirino

49. “What did she mean, study like you’re going to die? She said she spit up blood, but is that for real? Is studying really worth dying for? I couldn’t accept it, and I guess that was one of my weak points.”

— Natsuo Kirino