Michael Lewis Quotes

In the West, it's just a given that art exists in this high-class place. But in Japan, there's no high class. The minute you come out, you're low class.

If you are a success in life, there are places you must go and pay to be humiliated. It is an unwritten law that human beings must be tormented throughout their lives in one way or another. If you are fortunate enough to have risen to a social level where no one does it to you for free, then you must pay for the service.

Tonight, once more, life sinks its teeth into my heart.

As you look at many people's lives, you see that their suffering is in a way gratifying, for they are comfortable in it. They make their lives a living hell, but a familiar one.

That which has quelled me, lives with me, Accomplice in catastrophe.

To love is to suffer. To avoid suffering one must not love. But then one suffers from not loving. Therefore, to love is to suffer; not to love is to suffer; to suffer is to suffer. To be happy is to love. To be happy, then, is to suffer, but suffering makes one unhappy. Therefore, to be happy one must love or love to suffer or suffer from too much happiness.

Each time I told my story, I lost a bit, the smallest drop of pain.

Was ever grief like mine?

It is a testament to our naïveté about culture that we think that we can change it by simply declaring new values. Such declarations usually produce only cynicism.

Death is not the worst sorrow.

As far as I am concerned, the greatest suffering is to feel alone, unwanted, unloved. The greatest suffering is also having no one, forgetting what an intimate, truly human relationship is, not knowing what it means to be loved, not having a family or friends.

If in this hell of a world one can bring a little joy and peace even for a day into the heart of a single person, that much alone is true; this I have learnt after suffering all my life; all else is mere moonshine.

One could be happy not only without love, but despite it.

When we press the thorn to our chest we know, we understand, and still we do it.

I got my wish, I suppose. I left my scar.

Suffering is one very long moment. We cannot divide it by seasons.

I wonder how many times each day she dies a little.

...and there was nothing to do except to wait and to hurt.

There are all kinds of addicts, I guess. We all have pain. And we all look for ways to make the pain go away. (107)

If tears were liquor/ I'd have drunk myself sick.

Suffering for your art is most definitely overrated but I do get a certain, I don't know, satisfaction from being able to deal with my paranoia and insecurity.

Where there is most feeling, there is the greatest martyrdom.

When I was young, I remember having a particular pain about injustice. Suffering hurt me.

When another person makes you suffer, it is because he suffers deeply within himself, and his suffering is spilling over. He does not need punishment; he needs help. That's the message he is sending.

That was another lesson I had learned perhaps too well: people meant pain.