"It is a wretched affair for one to speak to Jietai men in circumstances like these. I thought that the Jietai was the last hope of Nippon, the last stronghold of the Japanese soul. But Japanese people today think of money, just money. Where is our national spirit today? The politicians care nothing for Japan. They are greedy for power. ... Japan is reveling in economic prosperity and has become spiritually empty. ... If the Japanese do not rise up, if the Jietai does not rise up, don't you understand that there will be no such thing as an amendment to the constitution? Don't you realize that if there is no amendment you will merely be American mercenaries? ... Is there not one person among you who will rise with me now? ... I know now for certain that no one else will rise for the constitutional amendment. My dream for the Jietai is gone. ... Long live the emperor!"

“My "act" has ended by becoming an integral part of my nature, I told myself. It's no longer an act. My knowledge that I am masquerading as a normal person has even corroded whatever of normality I originally possessed, ending by making me tell myself over and over again that it too was nothing but a pretense of normality. To say it another way, I'm becoming the sort of person who can't believe in anything except the counterfeit.”

“There is something that even now strikes me as strange. Originally I was not possessed by gloomy thoughts. My concern, what confronted me with my real problem, was beauty alone. But I do not think that the war affected me by filling my mind with gloomy thoughts. When people concentrate on the idea of beauty, they are, without realizing it, confronted with the darkest thoughts that exist in this world. That, I suppose, is how human beings are made.”

“Human beings — they go on being born and dying, dying and being born. It's kind of boring, isn't it?”

“He'd been mistaken in thinking that if he killed himself the sordid bourgeois world would perish with him.”

“We tend to suffer from the illusion that we are capable of dying for a belief or theory. What Hagakure is insisting is that even in merciless death, a futile death that knows neither flower nor fruit has dignity as the death of a human being. If we value so highly the dignity of life, how can we not also value the dignity of death? No death may be called futile.”

“Actually the action called a kiss represented nothing more for me than some place where my spirit could seek shelter.”