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.

Manusia yang tak mau gelisah, sesungguhnya dia telah mati

"What seemed strangest to me when I found this diary was that I have no recollection of the day-to-day life it describes. If I do not recall them, where have those days gone? Where had they vanished to? I pondered the things that human beings lose to the past"

-from "Diary of My Sixteenth Year"

He could not call up the faces of his own mother and father, who had died three or four years before. He would look at a picture, and there they would be. Perhaps people were progressively harder to paint in the mind as they near one, loved by one. Perhaps clear memories came easily in proportion as they were ugly.

Even if you have the wit to look by yourself in a bush away from the other children, there are not many bell crickets in the world. Probably you will find a girl like a grasshopper whom you think is a bell cricket.

And finally, to your clouded, wounded heart, even a true bell cricket will seem like a grasshopper. Should that day come, when it seems to you that the world is only full of grasshoppers, I will think it a pity that you have no way to remember tonight’s play of light, when your name was written in green by your beautiful lantern on a girl’s breast.

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

-from "Gathering Ashes"

¿Pero cuánto durará esta belleza? A las mujeres nos entristece pensar en eso

The rich eyelashes again made him think that her eyes were half open.

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.

Do you think it's right to not say goodbye to the man you yourself said was on the very first page of your very first volume of your diary? This is the very last page of his.

Los viejos tienen la muerte, y los jóvenes el amor, y la muerte viene una sola vez y el amor muchas.

Even if you took it as cascading snowy mountains,it was not a cool snow-white. The cold of the snow and it's warm colour made a kind of music.

I could not bear the silences when the drum stopped. I sank down into the depths of the sound of the rain.

THE TRAIN came out of the long tunnel into the snow country.

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.