Noguchi Quotes

We are a landscape of all we have seen

I sing the song of my heartstrings, alone in the eternal muteness, in the face of God.

Ask us not whether we are right or wrong, happy or sad, sane or mad.

Life is no quest of longevity and days: Where are the flowers a hundred years old?

Though small, the shrine has a long history. In 1333—the Third Year of the Genko era—Lord Takeshigé Kikuchi ascended to it in order to implore the divine favor before going into battle. Victory was his, and in gratitude he had the shrine rebuilt. According to tradition, he himself carved the Worship Image, reciting a triple prayer after each stroke. This represented the god as standing on the mountain peak with one hand raised, gazing at the armed host he had blessed. It was an image of victory. Now, however, the morning after the rising, early on the auspicious Ninth Day of the Ninth Month, the time of the Chrysanthemum Festival, there were gathered around the shrine forty-six hunted survivors of a defeated force. Some standing, some sitting, they stared blankly about them, though the penetrating autumn chill made their wounds sting. The clear light of the rising sun cast a striped pattern as it shone down through the branches of the few old cedars that surrounded the shrine. Birds were singing. The air was fresh and clear. As for signs of last night’s sanguinary combat, these were visible in the soiled and bloodstained garments, the haggard visages, and the eyes that burned like live embers. Among the forty-six were Unshiro Ishihara, Kageki Abé, Kisou Onimaru, Juro Furuta, Tsunetaro Kobayashi, the brothers Gitaro and Gigoro Tashiro, Tateki Ura, Mitsuo Noguchi, Mikao Kashima, and Kango Hayami. Every man was silent, sunk deep in thought, looking off at the sea, or at the mountains, or at the smoke still rising from Kumamoto. Such were the men of the League at rest on the slope of Kimpo, some with fingers yellowed from brushing the petals of wild chrysanthemums that they had plucked while staring across the water at Shimabara Peninsula.

The real test for poets is how far they resist their impulse to utterance, or, in another word, to the publication of their own work—not how much they have written, but how much they have destroyed. To live poetry is the main thing, and the question of the poems written or published is indeed secondary.

So much of the most important personal news I'd received in the last several years had come to me by smartphone while I was abroad in the city that I could plot on a map, could represent spatially the events, such as they were, of my early thirties. Place a thumbtack on the wall or drop a flag on Google Maps at Lincoln Center, where, beside the fountain, I took a call from Jon informing me that, for whatever complex of reasons, a friend had shot himself; mark the Noguchi Museum in Long Island City, where I read the message ("Apologies for the mass e-mail...") a close cousin sent out describing the dire condition of her newborn; waiting in line at the post office on Atlantic, the adhan issuing from the adjacent mosque, I received your wedding announcement and was shocked to be shocked, crushed, and started a frightening multi week descent, worse for being so embarrassingly cliched; while in the bathroom at the SoHo Crate and Barrel--the finest semipublic restroom in lower Manhattan--I learned I'd been awarded a grant that would take me overseas for a summer, and so came to associate the corner of Broadway and Houston with all that transpired in Morocco; at Zucotti Park I heard my then-girlfriend was not--as she'd been convinced--pregnant; while buying discounted dress socks at the Century 21 department store across from Ground Zero, I was informed by text that a friend in Oakland had been hospitalized after the police had broken his ribs. And so on: each of these experiences of reception remained, as it were, in situ, so that whenever I returned to a zone where significant news had been received, I discovered that the news and an echo of its attendant affect still awaited me like a curtain of beads.

Out of the deep and the dark, A sparkling mystery, a shape, Something perfect, Comes like the stir of the day: One whose breath is an odour, Whose eyes show the road to stars, The breeze in his face, The glory of Heaven on his back. He steps like a vision hung in air, Diffusing the passion of Eternity; His abode is the sunlight of morn, The music of eve his speech: In his sight, One shall turn from the dust of the grave, And move upward to the woodland.

Quivering like a piece of fruit inside a dish of jello, he waited impatiently for the moment when the gelatine would kindly harden. It seemed to him that the coagulation of the world would have to be completed before he could look up to the blue sky with an easy mind and admire to his heart’s content the sunrise and sunset and the rustling of the treetops. Noguchi, like many other retired politicians, had wished to save “poetry” for his declining years. He had never had the leisure to appreciate that desiccated storage food, nor did he expect that it would taste good, but to such men as Noguchi, poetry lay hidden not in poetry itself so much as in an untroubled craving for poetry; poetry in fact symbolized the unshakable stability of the world. Poetry would make its appearance—indeed, would have to appear—when there was no further danger of the world changing, when one knew that there would be no further assaults of uncertainty, hopes, or ambitions. At such a time, he expected, the moral constraint of a lifetime and the armor of logic would melt and dissolve into poetry, like a column of white smoke rising in the autumn sky.

I . . . hurried to the city library to find out the true age of Chicago. City library! After all, it cannot be anything but Chicagoesque. His is the richest library, no doubt, as everything in Chicago is great in size and wealth. Its million books are filling all the shelves, as the dry goods fill the big stores. Oh, librarian, you furnished me a very good dinner, even ice cream, but—where is the table? The Chicago city library has no solemnly quiet, softly peaceful reading-room; you are like a god who made a perfect man and forgot to put in the soul; the books are worth nothing without having a sweet corner and plenty of time, as the man is nothing without soul. Throw those books away, if you don't have a perfect reading-room! Dinner is useless without a table. I want to read a book as a scholar, as I want to eat dinner as a gentleman. What difference is there, my dearest Chicago, between your honourable library and the great department store, an emporium where people buy things without a moment of selection, like a busy honey bee? The library is situated in the most annoyingly noisy business quarter, under the overhanging smoke, in the nearest reach of the engine bells of the lakeside. One can hardly spend an hour in it if he be not a Chicagoan who was born without taste of the fresh air and blue sky. The heavy, oppressive, ill-smelling air of Chicago almost kills me sometimes. What a foolishness and absurdity of the city administrators to build the office of learning in such place of restaurants and barber shops! Look at that edifice of the city library! Look at that white marble! That's great, admirable; that means tremendous power of money. But what a vulgarity, stupid taste, outward display, what an entire lacking of fine sentiment and artistic love! Ah, those decorations with gold and green on the marble stone spoil the beauty! What a shame! That is exactly Chicagoesque. O Chicago, you have fine taste, haven't you?

believe that at least twenty percent of autopsies nationwide reveal that the initial theory of the cause of death is wrong.

The real test for pots is how far they resist their impulse to utterance, or, in another word, to the publication of their own work—not how much they have written, but how much they have destroyed. To live poetry is the main thing, and the question of the poems written or published is indeed secondary.

The things useless are the things most useful under different circumstances (to give one example: a little stone lazy by a stream, which becomes important when you happen to hear its sermon), he will see that the aspect of uselessness in poetry is to be doubly valued since its usefulness is always born from it like the day out of the bosom of night.

The Western poet would be better off by parting from Christianity, social reform, and what not. I think it is time for them to live more of the passive side of Life and Nature; so as to make the meaning of the whole of them perfect and clear, to value the beauty of inaction so as to emphasise action, to think of Death so as to make Life more attractive.

I have no quarrel with one who emphasizes the immediate necessity of joining the hand of poetry and life; however, I wish to ask him the question what he means by the word life.

When one knows that the things useless are the things most useful under different circumstances (to give one example: a little stone lazy by a stream, which becomes important when you happen to hear its sermon), he will see that the aspect of uselessness in poetry is to be doubly valued since its usefulness is always born from it like the day out of the bosom of night

Oh Lord, is it the reflection of my heart on fire? Is it, my Lord, the rain carrying tragedy from the Heavens?

The process of discovery by the artist, however, though possibly based on similar needs and satisfactions, is rooted in his own development, and is incidental to it... Manet searching for [himself] found the Japanese art as a revelation which helped him in his own development

The fetus had not been harmed at all by the numerous stab wounds the mother received. Noguchi thought that the fetus probably lived for about fifteen to twenty minutes after its mother’s death before it, too, had died.

Despite ongoing criticism, Noguchi was totally dedicated to his work. He believed in the public’s right to know the truth and for telling it like it is – not as someone might have imagined it.

That afternoon, Noguchi announced his verdict in the tragic demise of America’s much beloved star, whose inspiring performances had been enjoyed by millions of moviegoers. The next morning, newspapers printed the sensational headline: HOLDEN BLED TO DEATH AFTER A DRUNKEN FALL – and all hell broke loose. People were outraged, not that Holden had been drinking, but that Noguchi felt compelled to tell everybody about it. The sense of rage was compounded by the revelation of personal details about Holden that his family and friends believed should have been kept private. Noguchi disagreed.

Noguchi was astonished by the “dangerous procession of street cars—cars above my head, cars under my feet, cars everywhere

The Rockefeller Foundation launched a “public-private partnership” with pharmaceutical companies called the International Health Commission, which set about feverishly inoculating the hapless populations of the colonized tropics with a yellow fever jab.56 The vaccine killed its beneficiaries in droves and failed to prevent yellow fever. The Rockefeller Foundation quietly dropped the useless vaccine after the foundation’s star researcher, the yellow fever vaccine’s inventor, Hideyo Noguchi, succumbed to the disease, likely contracted through careless laboratory exposure.

At the time of his death, the New York district attorney was investigating Noguchi for illegally experimenting on New York City orphans with syphilis vaccines without the consent of their legal guardians.

Noguchi’s controversial findings of drug addiction, suicide and murder brought him widespread attention. But he also was criticized for his forthright, often insensitive, remarks about the unfortunate demise of these victims.

Much of that hostility, which emanated from the entertainment industry, was racially motivated. There were many Americans, then and later, that resented Japanese people, such as Noguchi, who occupied positions of authority. “I am a coroner,” he said. “It is a noble profession.” Like a mortician, who embalms dead bodies, Noguchi was proud of his job. “I consider myself an artist.” Despite ongoing criticism, Noguchi was totally dedicated to his work. He believed in the public’s right to know the truth and for telling it like it is – not as someone might have imagined it.

The trouble today... is that... instead of leading to new and ever expanding visions tends to become precious-- better to be correct and successful... rather than risk wider horizons.

...once won critical and thus monetary value, recognized and easily recognizable, the artist has thereafter nothing to do but keep producing in a style that is, which is in large part the result of a technical innovation.

Vagueness is often a virtue; a god lives in a cloud; truth cannot be put on one's finger-tip. The darkness of night is beauty; that is only another view of the light of day.

The Hokku poet's chief aim is to impress the readers with the high atmosphere in which he is living.

I come always to the conclusion that the English poets waste too much energy in "words, words, words.

Noguchi nos enseñó que los objetos físicos no solo modifican la forma en que vemos y percibimos un espacio, sino que crean un contexto —un paisaje— en el que escenificamos nuestras vidas. Nuestro modo de vivir y nuestro entorno están íntimamente relacionados, aunque a menudo no nos demos cuenta, o simplemente lo olvidemos.

Yuki Noguchi, a reporter for NPR, said that Damore's firing has raised questions regarding the limits of free speech in the workplace. First Amendment free speech protections usually do not extend into the workplace, as the First Amendment restricts government action but not the actions of private employers, and employers have a duty to protect their employees against a hostile work environment.