Quotes from Yukio Mishima

Beings in existence thus are annihilated from moment to moment, and this gives rise to time. The process whereby time is engendered by this moment-to-moment annihilation may be likened to a row of dots and a line.

Cruel separation guarded the purity of emotion. The pangs of being apart were transformed into quiet joy. Danger aroused the sensual. Uncertainty fostered dreams.

Il dolore genuino può maturare soltanto a grado a grado. Somiglia strettamente alla tubercolosi, in quanto il male è già progredito e ha raggiunto lo stadio critico prima che il paziente si sia reso conto dei suoi sintomi.

Svoju patnju, koju prihvatam, moram da prihvatim kao dragocenost. Ne postoji nijedan ispira? zlata koji iskopava samo zlato. Ispira? vadi pesak sa korita reke, naslepo, ne razmišljaju?i šta ?e da izvadi iz vode. On bi voleo da je u pesku i zlato, ali možda ga uopšte ne?e biti, on mora da se pomiri sa time. Niko nema povlasticu da unapred odabere ono što želi.

He longed for a storm. But life aboard ship taught him only the regularity of natural law and the dynamic stability of the wobbling world.

Soggiacevo a quello struggimento, ormai ben attecchito in me, di voler nutrire realmente i sentimenti che mi venivano attribuiti.

I could hear the water running off the roof of the forwarding company next door. I could not shake the illusion that it was the radiance which was splashing down. Bright and shining slivers of it were suicidally hurling themselves at the sham quagmire of the pavement, all smeared with the slush of passing shoes.

Procurar placer a una mujer es exponerte a cien sinsabores sin un solo beneficio.

History is a record of destruction. One must always make room for the next ephemeral crystal. For history, to build and to destroy are one and the same thing.

Ammesso che la passione umana abbia la virtù d'innalzarsi al disopra di ogni assurdo, come si può sostenere che non abbia anche quella d'innalzarsi al disopra dei propri assurdi?

as long as conscious desire is at work, it will permit distinctions to exist. But if one can suppress it, these distinctions dissolve and one can be as content with a skull as with anything else.

Those words of my friend were like fertilizer poured over the poisonous weed of an idea deeply planted in me.

The cynics—well aware that there is nobody who despises the imagination so thoroughly as the dreamer

People do not love pets that will outlive them. A short life is a condition for love.

He never made fun of her as her neighbors did. That was why she visited him. He felt in this mad, ugly woman five years his senior a comrade in apartness. He liked people who refused to recognize the world.

Avanzamos entre las víctimas sin recibir una mirada, ni siquiera de reproche. Se nos ignoraba. Simplemente por no haber compartido su desgracia, nuestra existencia había sido borrada de nuestras vidas. No éramos para ellos más que sombras.

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

A hidden poetry that will be lost if any mediocrity is shed. Genius is a casualty. The poetry must never be conspicuous — its scent is only detectable when subtle.

To defile yourself, yet not really be defiled—that's true purity. If you're fastidious about defilement, you're not going to do anything. You'll never become a real man

It's only the desire to live as long as possible that makes everything seem complicated and mysterious.

From that moment, death hung over him, snugly, the way snow caps a red postbox after a particularly heavy snowfall.

Why were things wrong just as they were? The questions which I had asked myself numberless times since boyhood rose again to my lips. Why are we all burdened with the duty to destroy everything, change everything, entrust everything to impermanency? Is it this unpleasant duty that the world calls life? Or am I the only one for whom it is a duty?

Y comprendí que la fuerza que alentaba tal esperanza no era más que esa convicción primitiva y mágica que todos tenemos, la convicción de que yo era el único que jamás moriría.

La infancia es un periodo en el que el tiempo y el espacio se mezclan.