Quotes from Yukio Mishima

Words are a medium that reduces reality to abstraction for transmission to our reason, and in their power to corrode reality inevitably lurks the danger that the words will be corroded too.

Me siento responsable de la carne de esta mujer, pues me desgarra dulcemente como lo hacen otras cosas que son mías. Me estremece la dulzura de su presencia: cuando me sienta temblar se volcará como la hoja de un árbol sacudido por el viento y dejará que yo vea el lado vacío de sus ojos.

But it was the kind of experience—like death, like the glow of a jewel, like the beauty of a sunset—that is almost impossible to convey to others.

Dreams, memories, the sacred—they are all alike in that they are beyond our grasp. Once we are even marginally separated from what we can touch, the object is sanctified; it acquires the beauty of the unattainable, the quality of the miraculous. Everything, really, has this quality of sacredness, but we can desting, tear d touch. How strange man is! His touch defiles and yet he contains the source of miracles.

They think danger means something physical, getting scratched and a little blood running and the newspapers making a big fuss. Well, that hasn't got anything to do with it. Real danger is nothing more than just living.

I come out on the stage expecting the audience to weep, and instead they burst out laughing.

Duga patnja otupljuje ljude. Otupljeni od patnje više nisu u stanju posumnjati u radost.

When he was young, there had been only one reality, and the future had seemed to stretch before him, swelling with immense possibilities. But as he grew older, reality seemed to take many forms, and it was the past that seemed refracted into innumerable possibilities

Claro está que vivir no es más que el caos de la existencia, y más aún: es el afán loco y erróneo de ir desmantelando instante a instante la existencia hasta ver restaurado el caos inicial..

This was the domain established in less than twenty years by the young man of promise. Then he had had almost nothing over which his fingers might close with a sense of possession, but because the lack had stirred no anxious irritation in him, all these things had now come securely into his grasp.

People tend to be most terrified by the inexplicable. Fear seems to fade when a possible solution arises.

Finally, rocking the whole harbour and carrying to every city windows; besetting kitchens with dinner on the stove, and shoddy hotel bedrooms where sheets are never changed, and desks waiting for children to come home, and schools and tennis courts and graveyards; plunging everything into a moment of grief and ruthlessly tearing even the hearts of the uninvolved, the Rakuyo's horn screamed out one last enormous farewell. Trailing white smoke, she sailed straight out to sea.

No matter how serious the obligation, a star is more of a star if he never arrives. Absence is his forte. The question of whether he'll show up gives the event a ceaseless undercurrent of suspense. But a true star never arrives. Showing up is for second-rate actors who need to seek attention.

Stutter, stutter!

Come svanisce velocemente il ricordo delle azioni, a paragone con il ricordo dei sentimenti!»

la escuela, el colegio, no es sino una sociedad en miniatura. Por eso nos están dando órdenes continuamente. Un puñado de ciegos nos dice lo que tenemos que hacer, y hace trizas nuestras ilimitadas facultades.

If one looks down on one's old village from a distant mountain pass, whatever details of that era may have faded from memory, the significance of having lived there becomes vividly apparent.

To follow its shadow, to remain forever within it, she herself would have to become the sea. And at that moment, in a single great surge, she did.

Once passion was set in motion according to its own laws, then it was irresistible. This was a theory that would never be accepted by modern law, which took it as self-evident that conscience and reason ruled man.

A passagem do tempo, nunca deixa de fazer suas vítimas, sempre transforma o que era sublime em matéria para comédia. O que afinal fica corroído? Se o exterior é corroído, será verdade, então, que o sublime pertence por natureza apenas a um exterior que esconde um cerne cômico? Ou será que o sublime pertence de fato ao todo, mas acaba coberto por uma poeira ridícula?

Honda did not necessarily cling to the historical school of law, which was influenced by nineteenth-century romanticism, nor to the ethnic school. The Japan of the Meiji era, indeed, needed a nationalistic type of law, one that had its roots in the philosophy of the historical school. But Honda's concerns were quite different. He had first been intent on isolating the essential principle behind all law, a principle which he felt must exist.

Once the Captain had told him about going to Venice and visiting a beautiful little palace at high tide; and being astounded to find when he got there that the marble floors were under water...Ryuji almost spoke the words aloud: small beautiful flooded palace .

he was a ship loaded down with a full cargo of emotion, riding low in the dark winter sea of death. Isao

Now that I have taken my revenge on my enemy and have made a name for myself, I can lay down my swords, bows, and arrows.