Yasunari Kawabata Quotes

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.

In a gourd that had been handed down for three centuries, a flower that would fade in a morning.

Tengo costumbre de ponerme a escribir en el diario antes de acostarme, cuando vuelvo a casa, y a veces me quedo dormida escribiendo. Releyendo el diario es fácil adivinar los puntos en que me dormí… También dejo pasar días enteros sin anotar nada. Y esto no está bien. Ocurre que aquí, en la montaña, la salidas son siempre bastante parecidas. Una no sabe qué decir. Pero este año, en cambio, me procuré un cuaderno con una página destinada a cada día, y cometí un error. Basta que me ponga a escribir para no poder detenerme.

País de nieve, Yasunari Kawabata

And I can't complain. After all, only women are able really to love

Time flows in the same way for all human beings; every human being flows through time in a different way.

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.

What of it? Tokyo people are complicated. They live in such noise and confusion that their feelings are broken to little bits.” “Everything is broken to little bits.

The Tale of Genji in particular is the highest pinnacle of Japanese literature. Even down to our day there has not been a piece of fiction to compare with it. That such a modern work should have been written in the eleventh century is a miracle, and as a miracle the work is widely known abroad.

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.

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.

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.

"When you die, there is nothing — only a life that will be forgotten."

-from "Gathering Ashes"

My novel has found a beautiful soul. How shall I write it? Put your soul in the palm of my hand for me to look at, like a crystal jewel. I'll sketch it in words...

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.

"Twenty years old, I had embarked on this trip to Izu heavy with resentment that my personality had been permanently warped by my orphan's complex and that I would never be able to overcome a stifling melancholy. So I was inexpressibly grateful to find that I looked like a nice person as the world defines the word."

-from "The Dancing Girl of Izu"