Top 9 Quotes & Sayings by Shusaku Endo

Explore popular quotes and sayings by a Japanese author Shusaku Endo.
Last updated on December 3, 2024.
Shusaku Endo

Shūsaku Endō was a Japanese author who wrote from the rare perspective of a Japanese Catholic. Internationally, he is known for his 1966 historical fiction novel Silence, which was adapted into a 2016 film of the same name by director Martin Scorsese. He was the laureate of several prestigious literary accolades, including the Akutagawa Prize and the Order of Culture, and was inducted into the Roman Catholic Order of St. Sylvester by Pope Paul VI.

I became a Catholic against my will.
Christianity, to be effective in Japan, must change.
A person never knows their own true face. Everybody thinks that the phoney, posed social mask they wear is their real face. — © Shusaku Endo
A person never knows their own true face. Everybody thinks that the phoney, posed social mask they wear is their real face.
Sin, he reflected, is not what it is usually thought to be; it is not to steal and tell lies. Sin is for one man to walk brutally over the life of another and to be quite oblivious of the wounds he has left behind.
Christ did not die for the good and beautiful. It is easy enough to die for the good and beautiful; the hard thing is to die for the miserable and corrupt.
Every weakness contains within itself a strength.
The smell of death was thick in the city of Vara?asi. And in Tokyo as well. And yet the birds blissfully sang their songs.
True religion should be able to respond to the dark melodies, the faulty and hideous sounds that echo from the heart of men.
Over the years I have forged intimate familial ties with these characters, who are reflections of a portion of myself. Consequently, even a character who appeared only once in a short story waits now in the wings, concealed by the curtain, for his next appearance on-stage. Not one of them has ever broken free of his familial ties with me and disappeared for ever - at least, not within the confines of my heart.
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