“I can state from my own experience that what people fear in death is the loneliness of having to leave this world forever.”

— Kaneko Fumiko, The Prison Memoirs of a Japanese Woman (1991), p. 233

About Kaneko Fumiko

1903 – 1926

Japanese anarchist and writer whose prison memoirs were published after her death.

“Let your children play as they please! To play freely on this earth is the one privilege nature has given to children.”

“By nature human beings should be equal.”

“The virtue and beauty of human beings is to live naturally, ungoverned by external forces.”

“Accepting the absurdity of everything around us is one step, a necessary experience: it should not become a dead end.”

“You never know how much you really believe anything until its truth or falsehood becomes a matter of life and death to you.”

“It is a general popular error to suppose the loudest complainers for the publick to be the most anxious for its welfare.”

“The basic stimulus to the intelligence is doubt, a feeling that the meaning of an experience is not self-evident.”

“I pray — for word is out And prayer comes round again — That I may seem, though I die old, A foolish, passionate man.”

“Death in itself is nothing; but we fear To be we know not what, we know not where.”