Quotes from Yukio Mishima

Yet another memory: It is the odor of sweat, an odor that drove me onward, awakened my longings, overpowered me… Needless to say, the odor could not, at that time, have had any direct relationship with sexual sensations, but it did gradually and tenaciously arouse within me a sensuous craving for such things as the destiny of soldiers, the tragic nature of their calling, the distant countries they would see, the ways they would die…

The other guys did not feel the need to understand themselves that in me was so compelling: they could carry out their personality with the greatest naturalness, while I had to play a part, and this required a considerable acumen and study

Most writers are perfectly normal in the head and just carry on like wild men; I behave normally but I'm sick inside.

By means of microscopic observation and astronomical projection the lotus flower can become the foundation for an entire theory of the universe and an agent whereby we may perceive the Truth. And first we must know that each of the petals has eighty-four thousand veins and that each vein gives eighty-four thousand lights.

Even though the world might change into the kind I hoped for, it lost its rich charm at the very instant of change. The thing that lay at the far end of my dreams was extreme danger and destruction; never once had I envisaged happiness. The most appropriate type of daily life for me was a day-by-day world destruction; peace was the most difficult and abnormal state to live in.

Because in the pupils of his eyes there lingered the mysterious and eternal horizon that the sea leaves as a keepsake deep in the eyes of all who are born at the seaside and forced to depart from it.

A un cuore che tenti di avvicinarsi, il cuore dell'altro sembra lontano

Daydreaming is not an intellectual process but rather an escape from intellectualism.

There's no doubt that he'll be heading straight for tragedy. It will be beautiful, of course, but should he throw his whole life away as a sacrificial offering to such a fleeting beauty—like a bird in flight glimpsed from a window?

Besides, like a man who knows he is dying, he felt a need to be equally tender to all.

Ever since those days this has been the attitude with which I have always confronted life: from things too much waited for, too much embellished with anticipatory daydreams, there is in the end nothing I can do but run away.

Once I had started my solitude I realised anew that it was easy for me to become accustomed to this state and that the most effortless existence for me was in fact one in which I was not obliged to speak to anyone. My fretful attitude to life left me. Each dead day had its charm

Because all those people around you and Miss Satoko are moving slowly but inexorably toward a dénouement. You don't think the two of you can hover forever in mid-air like two dragonflies making love?

All of this caused Kiyoaki constant pain. In comparison with Satoko's public humiliation, however, he did not even have a slighting remark to contend with. And however acute his private agony, it was, after all, the torment of a coward.

Noboru tried to compare the corpse confronting the world so nakedly with what might have seemed the unsurpassably naked figures of his mother and the sailor; by comparison, they weren't naked enough. They were still swaddled in skin. Even that marvellous hom and the great wide world whose expanse it had limned couldn't possibly have penetrated as deeply as this ... the pumping of the bared heart placed the peeled kitten in direct and tingling contact with the kernel of the world.

More than anything else, Kiyoaki thought, more than Princess Chan, the emerald ring, their friends, their school, perhaps what the princes had needed had been sunshine. It seemed that summer had the power to heal all frustrations, soothe every grief, restore their lost happiness.

I had perceived dimly, too, that the only physical proof of the existence of consciousness was suffering. Beyond doubt, there was a certain splendor in pain, which bore a deep affinity to the splendor that lies hidden within strength.

No one can know what a sacrifice it is for me to be gentle and docile.

Surely, I thought, we do not deserve even a little happiness. Or perhaps we had acquired the bad habit of regarding even a little happiness as a big favor, which we would have to repay.

To be half-clever was the worst I could have done.

Fin dall'inizio ogni mia fantasia fu tinteggiata di disperazione, stranamente compiuta e somigliante di per se stessa a desiderio struggente

Il sole del pomeriggio batteva senza sosta la superficie del mare, e tutta la baia er a un'unica, stupenda distesa di fulgore. All'orizzonte campeggiavano alcune nuvole estive, ferme nel silenzio, immergendo parzialmente in acqua le forme sontuose, funeree, profetiche. I muscoli delle nuvole erano pallidi come alabastro.

Da li je bolest, u stvari, samo ubrzavanje života?

Since dark antiquity the words have been spoken by women of every caste to sailors in every port; words of docile acceptance of the horizon's authority, of reckless homage to that mysterious azure boundary; words never failing to bestow on even the haughtiest woman the sadness, the hollow hopes, and the freedom of the whore: 'You'll be leaving in the morning, won't you?...