…Her desire was close to that of the person who drowns himself; he does not necessarily covet death so much as what comes after the drowning — someth… - Yukio Mishima

True pain can only come gradually. It is exactly like tuberculosis in that the disease has already progressed to a critical stage before the patient becomes aware of its symptoms.

In his heart, he always preferred the actuality of loss to the fear of it.

By setting my fetish for reality and physical existence and my fetish for words on the same level, by making them an exact equation, I had already brought into sight the discovery I was to make later. From the moment I set the wordless body, full of physical beauty, in opposition to beautiful words that imitated physical beauty, thereby equating them as two things springing from one and the same conceptual source, I had in effect, without realizing it, already released myself from the spell of words. For it meant that I was recognizing the identical origin of the formal beauty in the wordless body and the formal beauty in words, and was beginning to seek a kind of platonic idea that would make it possible to put the flesh and words on the same footing. At that stage, the attempt to project words onto the body was already only a stone’s throw away. The attempt itself, of course, was strikingly unplatonic, but there remained only one more experience for me to pass through before
I could start to talk of the ideas of the flesh and the loquacity of the body.