Osamu Dazai

I have never managed to understand what human life is.

when anger makes them reveal in a flash human nature in all its horror. Seeing this happen has always induced in me a fear great enough to make my hair stand on end, and at the thought that this nature might be one of the prerequisites for survival as a human being,

"I like roses best. But they bloom in all four seasons. I wonder if people who like roses best have to die four times over again."

People always plunged me into horror. I even believed that I hadn't succeeded as a man, and as a result, I hid my torment in my heart of hearts.I tried hard to mask the melancholy and nervousness by wrapping myself in naive optimism and becoming an even bigger buffoon

I was frightened even by God. I could not believe in His love, only in His punishment.

The Yozo we knew was so easy-going and amusing, and if only be hadn't drunk—no, even though he did drink—he was a good boy, an angel."

I wait in momentary expectation, feeling as though my breasts are being crushed, for the sound in the corridor of the footsteps of happiness. Empty. Oh, life is too painful, the reality that confirms the universal belief that it is best not to be born.

Mine has been a life of much shame.

ow I have neither happiness nor unhappiness.
Everything passes.
That is the one and only thing I have thought resembled a truth in the society of human beings where I have dwelled up to now as in a burning hell.
Everything passes.
This year I am twenty-seven. My hair has become much greyer. Most people would take me for over forty.

that, as I recall, was her name, but the memory is too blurred for me to be sure: I am the sort of person who can forget even the name of the woman with whom he attempted suicide)