I want to make a poem of my life. - Yukio Mishima

For a long time I had not approached the forbidden fruit called happiness, but it was now tempting me with a melancholy persistence. I felt as though Sonoko were an abyss above which I stood poised.

His conviction of having no purpose in life other than to act as a distillation of poison was part of the ego of an eighteen-year-old. He had resolved that his beautiful white hands would never be soiled or calloused. He wanted to be like a pennant, dependent on each gusting wind. The only thing that seemed valid to him was to live for the emotions — gratuitous and unstable, dying only to quicken again, dwindling and flaring without direction or purpose.

Perfect purity is possible if you turn your life into a line of poetry written with a splash of blood.