Quotes from Yasunari Kawabata

Because you cannot see him, God is everywhere.

Time flows in the same way for all human beings; every human being flows through time in a different way.

As he caught his footing, his head fell back, and the Milky Way flowed down inside him with a roar.

Cosmic time is the same for everyone, but human time differs with each person. Time flows in the same way for all human beings; every human being flows through time in a different way.

The true joy of a moonlit night is something we no longer understand. Only the men of old, when there were no lights, could understand the true joy of a moonlit night.

Put your soul in the palm of my hand for me to look at, like a crystal jewel. I'll sketch it in words...

I suppose even a woman's hatred is a kind of love.

Time passed. But time flows in many streams. Like a river, an inner stream of time will flow rapidly at some places and sluggishly at others, or perhaps even stand hopelessly stagnant. Cosmic time is the same for everyone, but human time differs with each person. Time flows in the same way for all human beings; every human being flows through time in a different way.

Does pain go away and leave no trace, then?' 'You sometimes even feel sentimental for it.

Now, even more than the evening before, he could think of no one with whom to compare her. She had become absolute, beyond comparison. She had become decision and fate.

Lunatics have no age. If we were crazy, you and I, we might be a great deal younger.

I wonder what the retirement age is in the novel business. The day you die.

People have separated from each other with walls of concrete that blocked the roads to connection and love. and Nature has been defeated in the name of development.

Because you cannot see him, God is everywhere.

It's remarkable how we go on year after year, doing the same old things. We get tired and bored, and ask when they'll come for us

A poetess who had died young of cancer had said in one of her poems that for her, on sleepless nights, 'the night offers toads and black dogs and corpses of the drowned.

The road was frozen. The village lay quiet under the cold sky. Komako hitched up the skirt of her kimono and tucked it into her obi. The moon shone like a blade frozen in blue ice.

After all, only women are able really to love.

Perhaps they don't realize where they were, so they went on living.

They were words that came out of nothing, but they seemed to him somehow significant. He muttered them over again.

Was this the bright vastness the poet Bash? saw when he wrote of the Milky Way arched over a stormy sea?

You've always been fond of understanding people too well." "They should arrange not to be understood quite so easily.

The stars, almost too many of them to be true, came forward so brightly that it was as if they were falling with the swiftness of the void.

After he became the Master, the world believed that he could not lose, and he had to believe it himself. Therein was the tragedy.