Yasunari Kawabata Quotes

Love is my only lifeline.

El tiempo pasó. Pero el tiempo se divide en muchas corrientes. Como en un rio, hay una corriente central rapida en algunos sectores y lenta, hasta inmóvil, en otros. El tiempo cósmico es igual para todos, pero el tiempo humano difiere con cada persona. El tiempo corre de la misma manera para todos los seres humanos; pero todo ser humano flota de distinta manera en el tiempo.

In the depths of the mirror the evening landscape moved by, the mirror and the reflected figures like motion pictures superimposed one on the other. The figures and the background were unrelated, and yet the figures, transparent and intangible, and the background, dim in the gathering darkness, melted into a sort of symbolic world not of this world. Particularly when a light out in the mountains shone in the center of the girl's face, Shimamura felt his chest rise at the inexpressible beauty of it.

The bonds between men and women predate language, and while the words we have used to express those ties may have grown exceptionally subtle and refined since language first arose, they are still just words. Words make our loves richer and more complicated, yes, but much has also been lost on their account - shrouded in the trappings of the age, drunk on the vacuity of artificial thrills. The progress of language is both a friend to love between the sexes and its enemy. Such love abides, it seems, in the mysterious depths where language cannot reach. Perhaps it's a slight exaggeration to say that the language of love is a stimulant, a drug; but whatever led us humans to create such a language , it was not life itself - which is the root of love - and therefore that language cannot engender the life that is the root of all else.

...he heard a sound that only a magnificent old bell could produce, a sound that seemed to roar forth with all the latent power of a distant world.

Was this the bright vastness the poet Bashō saw when he wrote of the Milky Way arched over a stormy sea?

She could not say why these rather inconspicuous green slopes had so touched her heart, when along the railway line there were mountains, lakes, the sea at times even clouds dyed in sentimental colors. But perhaps their melancholy green, and the melancholy evening shadows of the ridges across them, had brought on the pain. Then too, they were small, well-groomed slopes with deeply shaded ridges, not nature in the wild; and the rows of rounded tea bushes looked like flocks of gentle green sheep.

They were words that came out of nothing, but they seemed to him somehow significant. He muttered them over again.

¿Pero cuánto durará esta belleza? A las mujeres nos entristece pensar en eso

Dr. Yashiro Yukio, internationally known as a scholar of Botticelli, a man of great learning in the art of the past and the present, of the East and the West, has summed up one of the special characteristics of Japanese art in a single poetic sentence: "The time of the snows, of the moon, of the blossoms — then more than ever we think of our comrades." When we see the beauty of the snow, when we see the beauty of the full moon, when we see the beauty of the cherries in bloom, when in short we brush against and are awakened by the beauty of the four seasons, it is then that we think most of those close to us, and want them to share the pleasure. The excitement of beauty calls forth strong fellow feelings, yearnings for companionship, and the word "comrade" can be taken to mean "human being". The snow, the moon, the blossoms, words expressive of the seasons as they move one into another, include in the Japanese tradition the beauty of mountains and rivers and grasses and trees, of all the myriad manifestations of nature, of human feelings as well.

Wistaria sprays, as they trail in the breeze, suggest softness, gentleness, reticence. Disappearing and then appearing again in the early summer greenery, they have in them that feeling for the poignant beauty of things long characterized by the Japanese as mono no aware.

From the way of Go the beauty of Japan and the Orient had fled. Everything had become science and regulation.

She was afraid to touch the dictionary — Oki was even there. Innumerable words reminded her of him. To link whatever she saw and heard with her love was nothing less than to be alive. Her awareness of her body was inseparable from her memory of his embrace.

The snow on the distant mountains was soft and creamy, as if veiled in a faint smoke.

ربما ليس هناك بوذا للعجائز لكى يبتهلوا إليه لكن فتاة عارية جميلة يضمونها بين أذرعهم ذارفين دموعا باردة غارقين فى شهقات قوية منتحبين , فتاة غافلة عن كل شىء ولن تستفيق مطلقاً تمنحهم حريتهم المطلقة فى الندم حريتهم المطلقة فى النحيب دون أن يشعروا بأى ندم أو طعن كبريائهم أفلا يمكن إذا إعتبار الجميلات النائمات من هذه الوجهة إلهات مثل بوذا ونابضات بالحياة فوق ذلك ؟ أليست رائحة فتاة شابة وبشرتها تكفيراً للعجائز التاعسين وتعزية لهم !؟ ص 91