Yasunari Kawabata Quotes

Any kind of inhumanity, given practice, becomes human. All the varieties of transgression are buried in the darkness of the world.

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

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.

El tiempo corre de la misma manera para todos los seres humanos; pero todo ser humano flota de distinta manera en el tiempo.

"It's not right to live so long in this world only moving backward."

-from "Diary of My Sixteenth Year"

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.

Your ears are lovely, he said, but there's a kind of eerie beauty to your profile.

For such a tiny death, the empty eight-mat room seemed enormous.

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

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.

From the way of Go the beauty of Japan and the Orient had fled. Everything had become science and regulation.

إذا اتفق ونمت نوماً أبدياً فلن أتذمر ص 96

A voice so beautiful it was almost lonely, calling out as if to someone who could not hear, on ship far away.

Stop. I don't like it. I don't like having people die.

He closed his eyes and the warmth sank into his head, bringing an immediate sense of life. Reality came through the violent breathing, and with a sort of nostalgic remorse. He felt as though he was waiting tranquilly for some undefined revenge.