In its essence, any art that relies on words makes use of their ability to eat away — of their corrosive function — just as etching depends on the co… - Yukio Mishima

The arrows have eaten into the tense, fragrant, youthful flesh and are about to consume his body from within with flames of supreme agony and ecstasy. But there is no flowing blood, nor yet the host of arrows seen in other pictures of Sebastian’s martyrdom. Instead, two lone arrows cast their tranquil and graceful shadows upon the smoothness of his skin, like the shadows of a bough falling upon a marble stairway...

That is because the most subtle and delicate wishes of evil are not for a physical wound but for a spiritual.

I longed for the great sense of relief that death would surely bring if only, like a wrestler, I could wrench the heavy weight of life from my shoulders.