Silence
Silence
by Shūsaku Endō
First published 1980 · 294 pages · about 5 hours to read
Won: Tanizaki Prize (1966)
About this book
An historical novel by Japanese writer Shusaku Endo telling the story of a young Portuguese missionary in 17th Century Japan. After being smuggled into the country a Jesuit missionary fresh from the seminary finds the Christian population have been forced underground by a government eager to stamp out foreign interference and values. Consequently he quickly finds himself a fugitive in a strange and frightening land and begins to doubt his mission due to the silence of his god.
Quotes
“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.”
Chapter 3 “The wisdom of peasants shows itself in their ability to pretend that they are fools.”
Chapter 4 “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.”
Chapter 5 “The reason why darkness is terrifying for us, he reflected, is that there remains in us the instinctive fear the primitive man had when there was as yet no light.”
Chapter 8
Quotes from Wikiquote (CC BY-SA 4.0), chosen with AI.
Books like Silence
More by Shūsaku Endō
- Deep RiverDeep River1994
- The SamuraiThe Samurai1982
- When I WhistleWhen I Whistle1979
- Wonderful FoolWonderful Fool1974
- A Life of JesusA Life of Jesus1973
- The Sea and PoisonThe Sea and Poison1972