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

In the way that most men fail to see their own cruelty, Yozo had not noticed his gentleness and his capacity for love.

I was being corrupted. I now think that to perpetrate such a thing on a small child is the ugliest, vilest, cruelest crime a human being can commit. But I endured it.

if things went well I would like to become his inseparable friend; but if this proved utterly impossible, I had no choice but to pray for his death.

I have frantically played the clown in order to disentangle myself from these painful relationships, only to wear myself out as a result.

I know that I am liked by other people, but I seem to be deficient in the faculty to love others.

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