Yasunari Kawabata Quotes

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.

It was a stern night landscape. The sound of the freezing of snow over the land seemed to roar deep into the earth. There was no moon. 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. As the stars came nearer, the sky retreated deeper and deeper into the night clolour. The layers of the Border Range, indistinguishable one from another, cast their heaviness at the skirt of the starry sky in a blackness grave and somber enough to communicate their mass. The whole of the night scene came together in a clear, tranquil harmony.

"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"

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.

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

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

The notes went out crystalline into the clean winter morning, to sound on the far, snowy peaks.

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

国境の長いトンネルを抜けると雪国であった。夜の底が白くなった。信号所に汽車が止まった。

إن العمل الشائن المقترف يرتبط بمقترفه، ويحكم عليه باقتراف أعمال شائنة أخرى، هكذا تتكون العادات السيئة.

Your mother was such a gentle person. I always feel when I see someone like her that I'm watching the last flowers fall. This is no world for gentle people.

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

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

Long accustomed to a life of self-indulgent solitude, he began to yearn for the beauty of giving himself to others. The nobility of the word 'sacrifice' became clear to him. He took satisfaction in the feeling of his own littleness as a single seed whose purpose was to carry forward from the past into the future the life of the species called humanity. He even sympathized with the thought that the human species, together with the various kinds of minerals and plants, was no more than a small pillar that helped support a single vast organism adrift in the cosmos — and with the thought that it was no more precious than the other animals and plants.