Thus in a single phrase I can define the great illusion concerning 'love' in this world. It is the effort to join reality with the apparition. - Yukio Mishima

The special quality of hell is to see everything clearly down to the last detail.

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.

How oddly situated a man is apt to find himself at the age of thirty-eight! His youth belongs to the distant past. Yet the period of memory beginning with the end of youth and extending to the present has left him not a single vivid impression. And therefore he persists in feeling that nothing more than a fragile barrier separates him from his youth. He is forever hearing with the utmost clarity the sounds of this neighboring domain, but there is no way to penetrate the barrier.