Yasunari Kawabata Quotes

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.

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.

Perhaps it was a melancholy comfort for an old man to be sunk in memories of women who would not come back from the far past, even while he fondled a beauty who would not awaken.

I myself have two specimens of Ikkyu's calligraphy. One of them is a single line: "It is easy to enter the world of the Buddha, it is hard to enter the world of the devil." Much drawn to these words, I frequently make use of them when asked for a specimen of my own calligraphy. They can be read in any number of ways, as difficult as one chooses, but in that world of the devil added to the world of the Buddha, Ikkyu of Zen comes home to me with great immediacy. The fact that for an artist, seeking truth, good, and beauty, the fear and petition even as a prayer in those words about the world of the devil — the fact that it should be there apparent on the surface, hidden behind, perhaps speaks with the inevitability of fate. There can be no world of the Buddha without the world of the devil. And the world of the devil is the world difficult of entry. It is not for the weak of heart.

Put your soul in the palm of my hand for me to look at, like a crystal jewel. I'll sketch it in words...

Lunatics have no age. If we were crazy, you and I, we might be a great deal younger.

After he became the Master, the world believed that he could not lose, and he had to believe it himself. Therein was the tragedy.

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

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

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

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

Father's life was only a very small part of the life of a tea bowl.

Maybe vagueness has been good for me. The word means two different things in Tokyo and Osaka, you know. In Tokyo it means stupidity, but in Osaka they talk about vagueness in a painting and in a game of Go.

Along the coast the sea roars, and inland the mountains roar – the roaring at the center, like a distant clap of thunder.

The high, thin nose was a little lonely, a little sad, but the bud of her lips opened and closed smoothly, like a beautiful little circle of leeches.