Yasunari Kawabata Quotes
Cosmic time is the same for everyone, but human time differs with each person. Time flows in the same way for all human beings; every human being flows through time in a different way.
The true joy of a moonlit night is something we no longer understand. Only the men of old, when there were no lights, could understand the true joy of a moonlit night.
Put your soul in the palm of my hand for me to look at, like a crystal jewel. I'll sketch it in words.
The labor into which a heart has poured its whole love--where will it have its say, to excite and inspire, and when?
The road was frozen. The village lay quiet under the cold sky. Komako hitched up the skirt of her kimono and tucked it into her obi. The moon shone like a blade frozen in blue ice.
It's remarkable how we go on year after year, doing the same old things. We get tired and bored, and ask when they'll come for us
People have separated from each other with walls of concrete that blocked the roads to connection and love. and Nature has been defeated in the name of development.
Does pain go away and leave no trace, then?’ ‘You sometimes even feel sentimental for it.
Lunatics have no age. If we were crazy, you and I, we might be a great deal younger.
A secret, if it's kept, can be sweet and comforting, but once it leaks out it can turn on you with a vengeance.
They were words that came out of nothing, but they seemed to him somehow significant. He muttered them over again.
Now, even more than the evening before, he could think of no one with whom to compare her. She had become absolute, beyond comparison. She had become decision and fate.
From the way of Go the beauty of Japan and the Orient had fled. Everything had become science and regulation.
The snow on the distant mountains was soft and creamy, as if veiled in a faint smoke.
Along the coast the sea roars, and inland the mountains roar – the roaring at the center, like a distant clap of thunder.
But a haiku by Buson came into his mind: 'I try to forget this senile love; a chilly autumn shower.' The gloom only grew denser.
A poetess who had died young of cancer had said in one of her poems that for her, on sleepless nights, 'the night offers toads and black dogs and corpses of the drowned.
I wonder what the retirement age is in the novel business.The day you die.
Put your soul in the palm of my hand for me to look at, like a crystal jewel. I'll sketch it in words...