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Nip the Buds, Shoot the Kids QUOTES

Nip the Buds, Shoot the Kids QUOTES

1 " I thought about death and was gripped by feelings which choked my chest and made my throat dry, a sudden pushing and shoving in my guts. It was a sort of chronic ailment I had. Once that feeling and that agitation of my whole body had begun, I wouldn't be able to shake it off until I got to asleep. And I couldn't recall it with the same impact in the daytime. "

― Kenzaburō Ōe , Nip the Buds, Shoot the Kids

2 " Time doesn't move at all, I thought in irritation. Like a domestics animal, time doesn't move without human beings' strict supervision. Like a horse or a sheep, time won't move a step without grown ups' orders. We are a steady state in the stagnation of time. "

― Kenzaburō Ōe , Nip the Buds, Shoot the Kids

3 " Death’, for me, was my non-existence in a hudred years’ tie and, in a few hundred years’ time, my nonexistence in a boundless far future. Even in that distance future wars would break out, children would be sent to reformatories, some would prostitute themselves with homosexuals and some woukd have fairly healthy sex lives.

But then I wouldn’t be there. "

― Kenzaburō Ōe , Nip the Buds, Shoot the Kids

4 " Overwhelmed by the provocative, hopeless, oppressive image of death, making a painful effort to get to sleep, I was so jealous when I heard my brother’s peaceful breathing yhat I could have lost my tender feelings towards him. "

― Kenzaburō Ōe , Nip the Buds, Shoot the Kids

5 " The primitive Japanese, so terrified of the resurrection of their dead, had folded the legs of the corpses and piled their graves with massively heavy slabs of stone. We too stamped the earth flat with legs stregthened by fear of our friend, once a comrade of ours, rising up from out of the earth and rampagning in the village where children had bren left behind alone and cut off. "

― Kenzaburō Ōe , Nip the Buds, Shoot the Kids

6 " We had possessed and controlled the village, I thought, suddenly smitten by trembling. We had not been cut off in the village, we had occupied it. We had yielded up our dominion to the grown-upd without resistance, and in the end we were shut up in the shed. We’d been fooled, really fooled. "

― Kenzaburō Ōe , Nip the Buds, Shoot the Kids

7 " They kill each other,’ Li said, filled with hatred. ‘We hid him, but the Japanese kill each other. The MPs, the constables and the peasants with their bamboo spears; a load of people hunt down those who’ve got away into the mountains and stab them to death. I don’t understand what they do. "

― Kenzaburō Ōe , Nip the Buds, Shoot the Kids

8 " It was certainly real food, the wholesome humane meal which we were never able to get during our long spell in the reformatory, during our evacuation marches and during our time as children on our own. It was rice rolled by the hands of village women who lived free in the fields, meadows and streets, and soup which had been tasted by the tongues of ordinary housewives, not the cold mechanical meals cut off from affection and ordinary life. My comrades mulishly turned their backs on me as they devoured it, clearly feeling shame towards me. But I myself was ashamed of the saliva flowing in my mouth, my contracting stomach and the hunger which madr my blood run dry through my whole body. "

― Kenzaburō Ōe , Nip the Buds, Shoot the Kids