“It's okay to feel weak sometimes. It's okay to be afraid. The important thing is that we face our fears. That's...that's what makes us strong.”
Yuki Sohma Quotes
3 quotes from Fruits Basket, each with commentary on what it means and why it stuck.
Read the character analysis and its source limits
Yuki's school reputation offers Tohru a version of him that their walk home complicates. Admirers police access to him, while he interrupts their confrontation with her and thanks her friends for helping. Later, he objects to her sympathy for the zodiac's excluded cat. His explanation of how the rat entered the zodiac gives way to irritation rather than the gracious manner expected of the school prince. Yet that sharpness does not exhaust the opening's account of him. He notices that Tohru looks unwell and helps search the collapsed campsite when she worries about her mother's photograph. Our reading is that courtesy becomes more useful when it answers a particular need than when it maintains a public image. His helpfulness does not make his contempt for the cat harmless. The manga lets both responses belong to him without making either his whole character.
“I won't ask what you wish for. I only hope it comes true by your own two hands.”
Said to Kyo, the cousin Yuki despises and envies. He declines to ask what the cat wants and wishes only that Kyo gets it by his own hands. From the rat to the cat that is an unusually clean courtesy: it asks nothing back, offers no help, and leaves the rivalry where it was.
“It's called a calendar, stupid.”
Kagura has arrived for Valentine's Day, Kyo is shouting that he should have left on his journey sooner, and Yuki supplies the household's driest sentence. The rat and the cat have a rivalry the zodiac legend built for them, and the series is careful to make it petty rather than grand. They do not duel over honor. They needle each other about calendars, girly men and Jason the bear, and the cat never lands a decent blow on the rat. What the exchange sets up is the running joke that Yuki is only ever effortlessly, quietly cruel to one person, and that Kyo would rather have that than the politeness Yuki gives everyone else. Their reconciliation late in the manga lands because it began here, at home, over chocolate, with nothing at stake but a calendar.
About Yuki Sohma
Guides
- Fruits Basket Watch Order: 2001, 2019 and Prelude
- The Best Fruits Basket Quotes, Every Line Checked
- Fruits Basket's Ending, Explained: How the Curse Breaks
- Fruits Basket: Sub or Dub?
- Fruits Basket Manga Buying Guide: Collector’s Edition, Box Set or Tokyopop
- Tohru Honda: Kindness and Unspoken Needs
Around Fruits Basket
More from Fruits Basket
Read Yuki Sohma's story from the start
Explore Fruits Basket in book form. Check the listing for the edition, language and volumes included. The source beside each quote records where its wording was checked; it may differ from the wording in this edition.
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It is the Yuki line that could belong to anyone. Yuki's actual material is far more specific and far less consoling: a child kept in a dark room by Akito, a mother who handed him over for the family's advancement, a boy so used to being an object of adoration at school that he cannot tell whether anyone likes him. The rat's arc is about learning to want things for himself instead of being what others need, and the reboot gives him a student council and a girl who snaps chalk in half to find it. Against that, a sentence about facing fears is the character on autopilot. It is not false. It is the line a gentler show would give him, and the reason Fruits Basket is better than a gentler show is everything else he says.