“I am on the edge of the crowd, at the periphery; but I belong to it, I am attached to it by one of my extremities, a hand or foot. I know that the periphery is the only place I can be, that I would die if I let myself be drawn into the center of the fray, but just as certainly if I let go of the crowd. This is not an easy position to stay in, it is even very difficult to hold, for these beings are in constant motion and their movements are unpredictable and follow no rhythm. They swirl, go north, then suddenly east; none of the individuals in the crowd remains in the same place in relation to the others. So I too am in perpetual motion; all this demands a high level of tension, but it gives me a feeling of violent, almost vertiginous, happiness.”

“It’s all memories now, and distance.”

“How far away one was. How much one had forgotten.”

“As nothing is more foolish than wisdom out of place, so nothing is more imprudent than unseasonable prudence. And he is unseasonable who does not accommodate himself to things as they are, who is ‘unwilling to follow the market’, who does not keep in mind at least one rule of conviviality, 'Either drink or get out’; who demands, in short, that the play should no longer be a play. The part of a truly prudent man, on the contrary, is not to aspire to wisdom beyond his station, and either, along with the rest of the crowd, pretend not to notice anything, or affably and companionably be deceived.”

“This, that wears a plighted garland of flowers, and smells so perfumed, is Pleasure. The other, which appears in so smooth a skin, and pampered-up flesh, is Sensuality. She that stares so wildly, and rolls about her eyes, is Madness.”

“The name “Ghibli” was chosen by Miyazaki from the Italian noun ghibli (also used in English), based on the Libyan Arabic name for hot desert wind (قبلي, ‘ghiblī’), the idea being that the studio would “blow a new wind through the anime industry”. It also refers to an Italian aircraft, the Caproni Ca.309. Although the Italian word would be more accurately transliterated as “Giburi” (ギブリ), with a hard g sound, the studio is romanised in Japanese as Jiburi.”

“Anytime you’re gonna grow, you’re gonna lose something. You’re losing what you’re hanging onto to keep safe. You’re losing habits that you’re comfortable with, you’re losing familiarity.”

“Maybe it is the nothingness that is real and our entire dream is nonexistent, but in that case we feel that these phrases of music, and these notions that exist in relation to our dream, must also be nothing. We will perish, but we have for hostages these divine captives who will follow us and share our fate. And death in their company is less bitter, less inglorious, perhaps less probable.”

“[Tyrants] fear the brave because they might dare something for the sake of freedom; the wise, because they might contrive something; and the just, because the multitude might desire to be ruled by them.”

“The fundamental premise of conventionalism is, then, nothing other than the idea of philosophy as the attempt to grasp the eternal. The modern opponents of natural right reject precisely this idea. According to them, all human thought is historical and hence unable ever to grasp anything eternal. Whereas, according to the ancients, philosophizing means to leave the cave, according to our contemporaries all philosophizing essentially belongs to a ‘historical world,’ 'culture,’ 'civilization,’ 'Weltanschauung,’ that is, to what Plato had called the cave.”