Yasunari Kawabata Quotes

Quiero que nos abramos paso a través de nuestro destino y que flotemos sobre las aguas. El mañana siempre se nos escapa.

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.

I suppose even a woman's hatred is a kind of love.

And the Milky Way, like a great aurora, flowed through his body to stand at the edges of the earth. There was a quiet, chilly loneliness in it, and a sort of voluptuous astonishment.

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.

The "secret" of their being up in the tree had continued for almost two years now. Where the thick trunk branched out near the top, the two could sit comfortably. Michiko, straddling one branch, leaned back against another. There were days when little birds came and days when the wind sang through the pine needles. Although they weren't that high off the ground, these two little lovers felt as if they were in a completely different world, far away from the earth.

Two middle-aged American couples came back from the dining car and, as soon as they could see Mt. Fuji, past Numazu, stood at the windows eagerly taking photographs. By the time Fuji was completely visible, down to the fields at its base, they seemed tired of photographing and had turned their backs to it.

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 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.

And then you may think of it as promiscuous, but the girl herself is asleep, and doesn’t even know who she has slept with. The girl the other time and the girl tonight will never know a thing about you, and to speak of promiscuousness is a little…

I have an essay with the title "Eyes in their Last Extremity". The title comes from the suicide note of the short-story writer Akutagawa Ryunosuke... It is the phrase that pulls at me with the greatest strength. Akutagawa said that he seemed to be gradually losing the animal something known as the strength to live, and continued: "I am living in a world of morbid nerves, clear and cold as ice... I do not know when I will summon up the resolve to kill myself. But nature is for me more beautiful than it has ever been before. I have no doubt that you will laugh at the contradiction, for here I love nature even when I am contemplating suicide. But nature is beautiful because it comes to my eyes in their last extremity." Akutagawa committed suicide in 1927, at the age of thirty-five. In my essay, "Eyes in their Last Extremity", I had to say: "How ever alienated one may be from the world, suicide is not a form of enlightenment. However admirable he may be, the man who commits suicide is far from the realm of the saint." I neither admire nor am in sympathy with suicide.

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

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.

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

Cocorii albi de pe baticul tinerei Inamura zburară în amurgul care-i mai zăbovea sub pleoape.