Yasunari Kawabata Quotes

Now that Otoko had heard about the night at Enoshima, that old love flared up ominously within her. Yet in those flames she could see a single white lotus blossom. Their love was a dreamlike flower that not even Keiko could stain.

"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"

I wonder what the retirement age is in the novel business.

The day you die.

In the moonlight the fine geishalike skin took on the luster of a seashell.

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 live in such noise and confusion that their feelings are broken to little bits.

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.

Love is my only lifeline.

But this love would leave behind it nothing so definite as a piece of Chijimi. Though cloth to be worn is among the most short-lived of craftworks, a good piece of Chijimi, if it has been taken care of, can be worn quite unfaded a half-century and more after weaving. As Shimamura thought absently how human intimacies have not even so long a life, the image of Komako as the mother of another man’s children suddenly floated into his mind. He looked around, startled. Possibly he was tired.

But love flowed into the apology, to coddle and mollify the guilt.

Perhaps they don't realize where they were, so they went on living.

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

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.

As he caught his footing, his head fell back, and the Milky Way flowed down inside him with a roar.

He had thought on the train of sending his head to a laundry, it was true, but he had been drawn not so much to the idea of the laundered head as to that of the sleeping body. A very pleasant sleep, with head detached.