Kobo Abe: The Woman in the Dunes

Loneliness was an unsatisfied thirst for illusion.

"Do you shovel to survive, or survive to shovel?"

One could not do without repetition in life, like the beating of the heart, but it was also true that the beating of the heart was not all there was to life.

There wasn't a single item of importance [in the newspaper]. A tower of illusion, all of it, made of illusory bricks and full of holes. If life were made up only of imporant things, it really would be a dangerous house of glass, scarcely to be handled carelessly. But everyday life was exactly like the headlines. And so everybody, knowing the meaninglessness of existence, sets the centre of his compass at his own home.

If there were no risk of a punishment, a getaway would lose the pleasure.

Animal smell is beyond philosophy.

The fish you don't catch is always the biggest.