Quotes from Yukio Mishima

Life struck us as being a strangely volatile thing. It was exactly as though life were a salt lake from which most of the water had suddenly evaporated, leaving such a heavy concentration of salt that our bodies floated buoyantly upon its surface.

Blood and flowers were alike, Isao thought, in that both were quick to dry up, quick to change their substance. And precisely because of this, then, blood and flowers could go on living by taking on the substance of glory. Glory in all its form was inevitably something metallic.

For me, beauty is always retreating from one's grasp: the only thing I consider important is what existed once, or ought to have existed. By its subtle, infinitely varied operation, the steel restored the classical balance that the body had begun to lose, reinstating it in its natural form, the form that it should have had all along.

Those who believe, believe everything, while those who doubt don't believe a thing.

The whole house is spic and span and everybody's supposed to be real honest and full of what he calls 'the good'. We even leave food out for the mice in the rafters so they won't have to sin by stealing. And you know what happens when dinner's over? Everybody hunches over and licks his place clean so none of God's grace will be wasted.

They had laid the tender, down-ruffled little bird on a platter and appeared now to be pondering a way to eat out its heart without causing it distress.

Life strove mightily to exile orthodoxy, hospitalize heresy, and trap humanity into stupidity. It was an accumulation of used bandages soiled with layers of blood and pus. Life was the daily changing of the bandages of the heart that made the incurably sick, young and old alike, cry out in pain.

Existences and events occurring without any relationship to myself, occurring at places that not only appealed to my senses but were moreover denied to me— these, together with the people involved in them, constituted my definition of "tragic things." It seemed that my grief at being eternally excluded was always transformed in my dreaming into grief for those persons and their ways of life, and that solely through my own grief I was trying to share in their existences.

I somehow looked forward to death impatiently, with a sweet expectation. As i have remarked several times, the future was a heavy burden for me. From the very beginning, life has oppressed me with a heavy sense of duty. Even though i was clearly incapable of performing this duty, life still nagged at me for my dereliction. Thus 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.

He radiated the innocence that marks the absolute rejection of prudence.

A person who has been seriously wounded does not demand that the bandages that save his life be clean.

For everything sacred has the substance of dreams and memories, and so we experience the miracle of what is separated from us by time or distance suddenly being made tangible.

Everything, really, has this quality of sacredness, but we can desecrate it at a touch. How strange man is! His touch defiles and yet he contains the source of miracles.

I had been handed what might be called a full menu of all the troubles in my life while still too young to read it. But all I had to do was spread my napkin and face the table.

Well, that's what they do on television. Every fifteen minutes, there are breaks for commercials. That way we get to look forward to what's coming next. That's how it works in real life too.

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

I have been self-reliant to the point of sadness. I wonder when I first fell into the habit of washing my hands after each brush with humanity, lest I be contaminated.

I think it's a wonderful song," she said. But she was only shielding his pride, he knew. Obviously this was the first time she had ever heard the song, though she pretended to know it well. She can't penetrate to the feelings deep down in a song like this; or see through the murk of my manhood to the longing that sometimes makes me weep; fair enough: then as far as I'm concerned, she's just another body.

Because the fact of not being understood by other people had become my only real source of pride, I was never confronted by any impulse to express things and to make others understand something that I knew.

That was mere probing, my eye was really turned on an invisible realm far beyond the horizon. What is it to see the invisible? That is the ultimate vision, the denial at the end of all seeing, the eye`s denial of itself.

And one clouded stream that never ran dry was that choked with the scum of humanism, the poison spewed out by the factory at its headwaters. There it was: its lights burning brilliantly as it worked even through the night - the factory of Western European ideals. The pollution from that factory degraded the exalted fervor to kill; it withered the green of the sakaki's leaves.

the fact of not being understood by others had been my sole source of pride since my early youth, and I had not the slightest impulse to express myself in such a way that I might be understood. When I did try to clarify my thoughts and actions, I did so with no consideration whatsoever. I do not know whether or not this was because I wanted to understand myself. Such a motive is in accord with a person's real character and comes automatically to form a bridge between himself and others

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.

It's odd how one's memories of youth turn out so bleak. Why does the business of growing up—one's recollections of growth itself—have to be so tragic? I still haven't found the answer. I doubt if anybody has. When I finally reach that stage at which the placid wisdom of old age... occasionally descends on a person, then I too may suddenly discover that I understand. But I doubt whether, by that time, understanding will have much point.