Natsume Sōseki

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Over the wintry forest, winds howl in rage with no leaves to blow

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The average novel invariably reads like a detective's report. It is drab and tedious because it is never objective

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The memory of having sat at someone’s feet will later make you want to trample him underfoot. I’m trying to fend off your admiration for me, you see, in order to save myself from your future contempt. I prefer to put up with my present state of loneliness rather than suffer more loneliness later. We who are born into this age of freedom and independence and the self must undergo this loneliness. It’s the price we pay for these times of ours

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We who are born into this age of freedom and independence and the self must undergo this loneliness. It is the price we pay for these times of ours

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But once I could look back on it in a calmer frame of mind, it struck me that his motive was surely not so simple and straightforward. Had it resulted from a fatal collision between reality and ideals? Perhaps—but this was still not quite it. Eventually, I began to wonder whether it was not the same unbearable loneliness that I now felt that had brought K to his decision