Quotes from Yasunari Kawabata

He could not call up the faces of his own mother and father, who had died three or four years before. He would look at a picture, and there they would be. Perhaps people were progressively harder to paint in the mind as they were near one, loved by one. Perhaps clear memories came easily in proportion as they were ugly.

Supongo que en una mujer hasta el odio es una forma del amor.

Una de las muchachas era hermosa. Llevaba un bulto envuelto en un pañuelo con un diseño blanco de mil grullas sobre un fondo rosado de crespón

Be quick as another may be waiting

He went to the house, he said, when the despair of old age was too much for him.

Timpul se scurge la fel pentru toti, dar fiecare curge diferit in timp.

Was it as if a girl sound asleep, saying nothing, hearing nothing, said everything to and heard everything from an old man who, for a woman, was no longer a man?

He pampered himself with the somewhat whimsical pleasure of sneering at himself through his work, and it may well have been from such a pleasure that his sad little dream world sprang.

radiate up from the earth. But as the train went on, the

En el mundo de los juegos de competencia, los espectadores no pueden evitar erigir héroes más allá de los reales poderes que tengan sus elegidos.

What of it? Tokyo people are complicated. They live in such noise and confusion that their feelings are broken to little bits." "Everything is broken to little bits.

In the spray the girl stood naked. The facts were different, but in the course of time Eguchi's mind had made them so. As he grew old, the hills of Kyoto and the trunks of the red pines in gentle clusters could sometimes bring the girl back to Eguchi; but memories as vivid as tonight's were rare. Was it the youth of the sleeping girl that invited them?

La profondità dell'essere umano è proporzionale alle esperienze vissute e alla lontananza del tempo in cui il suo animo si immerge.

Does pain go away and leave no trace, then?

Fra le tante cose che suscitano nell'uomo una sensazione di impotenza, l'architettura è più di ogni altra arte soggetta a condizionamenti. Luogo, materiale, destinazione, grandezza, costi, le bizzarre richieste del cliente, e inoltre i carpentieri, gli imbianchini, i mobilieri... [...] Una casa come testamento significa una casa come piacerebbe a me.

Un ponte di pietra tra le anime? Meglio allora un arcobaleno. Sì, è possible che il ponte che unisce due anime sia simile a un arcobaleno.

It was a triviality, but the girl whose breast had been wet with blood had taught him that a man's lips could draw blood from almost any part of a woman's body; and, although afterwards Eguchi had avoided going to that extreme, the memory, the gift from a woman bringing strength to a man's whole life, was still with him, a full sixty-seven years old.

Talvez o sentimento do mal tivesse ficado anestesiado, confundido com costumes e ordens sociais

The window of the waiting-room was clear for an instant as the train started to move. Komako's face glowed forth, and as quickly disappeared. It was the bright red it had been in the mirror that snowy morning, and for Shimamura that color again seemed to be the point at which he parted with reality.

No fue él el único que te despidió cuando te mandaron a Tokio? ¿No es su nombre el que figura en la primera página del primero de tus diarios? Y ahora que él llega a la última página del suyo, ¿no vas a despedirlo? —No quiero hacerlo. No quiero verlo morir. Shimamura no supo si esa respuesta reflejaba el más gélido o el más conmovedor de los sentimientos.

He wondered whether the flowing landscape was not perhaps symbolic of the passage of time.

We were watching a battle, but it took clean forms.

In the darkness, warmed by the boy beside me, I gave myself up to my tears. It was as though my head had tumed to cleiir water, it was falling pleasantly away drop by drop; soon nothing would remain.

The west coast of the main island of Japan is probably for its latitude (roughly, from Cape Hatteras to New York, or from Spanish Morocco to Barcelona) the snowiest region in the world.