What more could I have done when I did not know that to love is both to seek and to be sought? For me love was nothing but a dialogue of little riddl… - Yukio Mishima

We are not wounded so deeply when betrayed by the things we hope for as when betrayed by things we try our best to despise.
In such betrayal comes the dagger in the back.

Ordinary bourgeois life held no force sufficiently compelling to drag one out into the chill drizzle without so much as an umbrella.

Isao had never felt that he might want to be a woman. He had never wished for anything else but to be a man, live in a manly way, die a manly death. To be thus a man was to give constant proof of one’s manliness–to be more a man today than yesterday, more a man tomorrow than today. To be a man was to forge ever upward toward the peak of manhood, there to die amid the white snows of that peak.

But to be a woman? It seemed to mean being a woman at the beginning and being a woman forever.