Yasunari Kawabata Quotes

En el mundo había gente tan parecida entre sí que se los podría tomar por padres e hijos. Pero difícilmente existieran muchos en el mundo. Tal vez hubiera un solo hombre que pudiera corresponderse con una muchacha y una sola joven que combinara con un hombre. Solo uno para algún otro; y tal vez en todo el mundo una sola pareja posible. Viven como extraños, sin suponer ningún tipo de lazo entre ellos y hasta ignorantes de la existencia del otro.
Por casualidad suben a un mismo tren, se reúnen por primera vez y probablemente nunca vuelvan a encontrarse. Treinta minutos en el curso de toda una vida. Se separan sin decirse una palabra. Habiendo estado sentados uno al lado del otro, sin mirarse, sin darse cuenta del parecido, se alejan siendo parte de un milagro del que no tomaron conciencia.
Y el único admirado por la rareza de todo eso es un extraño que se pregunta si, al ser un accidental testigo, no estará participando de un milagro.

Her manner was as though she were talking of a distant foreign literature. There was something lonely, something sad in it, something that rather suggested a beggar who has lost all desire.

The stars, almost too many of them to be true, came forward so brightly that it was as if they were falling with the swiftness of the void.

إلا أنني كنتُ في المدى الطويل ،لوحاً زجاجياً وحيداً ،كتلة زجاجية وحيدة
هل هناك شخص واحد من بيننا لا يحس بالزجاج على كاهله
؟

Supongo que en una mujer, hasta el odio es una forma del amor.

"Humankind, with its long history, is by now a corpse bound to a tree with the ropes of convention. If the ropes were cut, the corpse would simply fall to the ground. Prayer in one's mother tongue is a manifestation of that pathetic state."

-from "A Prayer in the Mother Tongue"

Any kind of inhumanity, given practice, becomes human. All the varieties of transgression are buried in the darkness of the world.

When you're held by the dead, you begin to feel that you aren't in this world yourself.

Era el cuerpo de mujer que invitaba al hombre a los círculos inferiores del infierno.

Stop. I don't like it. I don't like having people die.

A voice so beautiful it was almost lonely, calling out as if to someone who could not hear, on ship far away.

The notes went out crystalline into the clean winter morning, to sound on the far, snowy peaks.

إذا اتفق ونمت نوماً أبدياً فلن أتذمر ص 96

Anyway, it’s hardly a problem worth worrying about.

The Zen disciple sits for long hours silent and motionless, with his eyes closed. Presently he enters a state of impassivity, free from all ideas and all thoughts. He departs from the self and enters the realm of nothingness. This is not the nothingness or the emptiness of the West. It is rather the reverse, a universe of the spirit in which everything communicates freely with everything, transcending bounds, limitless. There are of course masters of Zen, and the disciple is brought toward enlightenment by exchanging questions and answers with his master, and he studies the scriptures. The disciple must, however, always be lord of his own thoughts, and must attain enlightenment through his own efforts. And the emphasis is less upon reason and argument than upon intuition, immediate feeling. Enlightenment comes not from teaching but through the eye awakened inwardly. Truth is in "the discarding of words", it lies "outside words". And so we have the extreme of "silence like thunder", in the Vimalakirti Nirdesa Sutra.