Shusaku-Endo Quotes

“Every weakness contains within itself a strength.”

— Shusaku-Endo

“Sin, he reflected, is not what it is usually thought to be; it is not to steal and tell lies. Sin is for one man to walk brutally over the life of another and to be quite oblivious of the wounds he has left behind.”

— Shusaku-Endo

“Christ did not die for the good and beautiful. It is easy enough to die for the good and beautiful; the hard thing is to die for the miserable and corrupt.”

— Shusaku-Endo

“Over the years I have forged intimate familial ties with these characters, who are reflections of a portion of myself. Consequently, even a character who appeared only once in a short story waits now in the wings, concealed by the curtain, for his next appearance on-stage. Not one of them has ever broken free of his familial ties with me and disappeared for ever - at least, not within the confines of my heart.”

— Shusaku-Endo

“True religion should be able to respond to the dark melodies, the faulty and hideous sounds that echo from the heart of men.”

— Shusaku-Endo

“No matter what the circumstances, no man can completely escape from vanity.”

— Shusaku-Endo

“A person never knows their own true face. Everybody thinks that the phoney, posed social mask they wear is their real face.”

— Shusaku-Endo

“Trample! Trample! It is to be trampled on by you that I am here.”

— Shusaku-Endo

A man who wields a pen has to be accountable to society.

— Shusaku-Endo

“The important thing in this life is to link your sadness to the sadness of others.”

— Shusaku-Endo

“At the core of her senseless actions, she vaguely perceived that she yearned for something. A something that would provide her with a sure sense of fulfillment. But she could not fathom what that something might be.”

— Shusaku-Endo

“The earth is not just for the clever and the strong.”

— Shusaku-Endo

“To be a saint or a man of too good a nature in today's pragmatic world, with everyone out to get the other fellow, was equivalent to being a fool, wasn't it?”

— Shusaku-Endo

“I don't want to die in darkness any thicker than this. I want to bring some kind of resolution in my life.”

— Shusaku-Endo

“We'll shake, we'll shake the tree of dreams,
That solitary tree of dreams
In the centre of the verdant field.”

— Shusaku-Endo

“Desolation would not be the proper word to describe his feelings now; it was more the sense of emptiness he imagined he might feel standing all alone on the surface of the moon.”

— Shusaku-Endo

“Man is a strange being. He always has a feeling somewhere in his heart that whatever the danger he will pull through. It's just like when on a rainy day you imagine the faint rays of the sun shining on a distant hill.”

— Shusaku-Endo

“When you sail, don't
Pull up the anchor weeping.
Be a man, do it laughing ...”

— Shusaku-Endo

But pity was not action. It was not love. Pity, like passion, was no more than a kind of instinct.

— Shusaku-Endo

“The seeds of salvation are buried in every act of evil.”

— Shusaku-Endo

“We priests are in some ways a sad group of men. Born into the world to render service to mankind, there is no one more wretchedly alone than the priest who does not measure up to his task.”

— Shusaku-Endo

“When you were still here, Isobe thought, death seemed so far removed from me. It was as though you stood with both arms outstretched, keeping death from me. But now that you're gone, suddenly it seems right here in front of me.”

— Shusaku-Endo

“There are neither the strong nor the weak. Can anyone say that the weak do not suffer more than the strong?”

— Shusaku-Endo

“The sound of darkness was certainly intricately linked to the sense of being alone but unrelated to this was the sound of the palpitations of men and women experiencing the sense of utter solitude. There was no doubt about it. This was a sound audible only on evenings such as this.”

— Shusaku-Endo

“People are linked together by enmity than by love.”

— Shusaku-Endo

“If I have trust in Catholicism, it is because I find in it much more possibility than in any other religion for presenting the full symphony of humanity. The other religions have almost no fullness; they have but solo parts. Only Catholicism can present the full symphony. And unless there is in that symphony a part that corresponds to Japan ... it cannot be a true religion.”

— Shusaku-Endo

“Lord, why are you silent? Why are you always silent ... ?”

— Shusaku-Endo

“In order to pile weakness upon weakness he was trying to drag others along the path that he himself had walked.”

— Shusaku-Endo

“The reason why darkness terrifying for us, he reflected, is that there remains in us the instinctive fear the primitive man had when there was as yet no light.”

— Shusaku-Endo