Kenko Yoshida Quotes

I am left alone in the wide world. My own dear family I have buried: one in Rangoon, and two in Amherst. What remains for me but to hold myself in readiness to follow the dear departed to that blessed world, 'Where my best friends, my kindred dwell, where God, my Saviour, reigns.'

I'm just a monk, I'm like a recluse.

You just never set roots; you take pleasure in simple conversations, because you know you're not going to have much more than that. It's very isolating, and that can be a good thing.

Tore up my heart and shut it down. Nothing to do, nowhere to be. A simple little kind of free. Nothing to do, no one but me, and that's all I need. I'm perfectly lonely.

I can see others in the sunlight; I can see our boats' crews and our athletic young men on the glistening water, or speckled with the moving lights of sunlit leaves; but I myself am always in the shadow looking on. Not unsympathetically, - God forbid! - but looking on alone, much as I looked at Sylvia from the shadows of the ruined house, or looked at the red gleam shining through the farmer's windows, and listened to the fall of dancing feet, when all the ruin was dark that night in the quadrangle.

But where I itty now, O my brothers, is all on my oddy knocky, where you cannot go. Tomorrow is all like sweet flowers and the turning vonny earth and the stars and the old Luna up there. ... And all that cal.

At that time, I often thought that if I had had to live in the trunk of a dead tree, with nothing to do but look up at the sky flowing overhead, little by little I would have gotten used to it.

I never really understood the word ‘loneliness’. As far as I was concerned, I was in an orgy with the sky and the ocean, and with nature.

We are all born and someday we'll all die. Most likely to some degree alone. Our aloneness in this world is, maybe not anymore, a thing to mourn.

Ah, tell me not that memory sheds gladness o'er the past, what is recalled by faded flowers, save that they did not last?

I've been able to carve out spaces for myself. At Sundance, I'm in the mountains - my property is private. I get on a horse and ride for three, four hours. Sometimes five. I get lost. But when I'm in, I'm in.

I think, at the end of the day, I have an outsider's heart.

They are all gone into the world of light, and I alone sit lingering here.

I want to be alone and work until the day my heads hits the drawing table and I'm dead. Kaput. I feel very much like I want to be with my brother and sister again. They're nowhere. I know they're nowhere and they don't exist, but if nowhere means that's where they are, that's where I want to be.

Separate we come, and separate we go, And this be it known, is all that we know.

The soul that sees beauty may sometimes walk alone.

When you're on the road and moving city to city, when someone isn't there at the end of the night, you feel empty.

Life is the desert, life the solitude, death joins us to the great majority.

I hope you love birds too. It is economical. It saves going to heaven.

We enter the world alone, we leave the world alone.

I feel I am strange to all but the birds of America.

So I've been pushed farther and farther out into the mountains, but at the same time realizing that that experience is really nice and I'm glad I'm getting pushed out there farther.

I envy the dead.

You must learn to exist with no religion, no country, no allies. You must learn to live alone in silence.

Turning back the pages of my sweet shattered dream, I wonder if she'll ever do the same; And the thing that I call living is just being satisfied With knowing I've got no one left to blame.