Top 67 Yasunari Kawabata Quotes
#1. And I can't complain. After all, only woemn are able really to love
Yasunari Kawabata
#2. I wonder what the retirement age is in the novel business.
The day you die.
Yasunari Kawabata
#3. He was conscious of an emptiness that made him see Komako's life as beautiful but wasted, even though he himself was the object of her love; and yet the woman's existence, her straining to live, came touching him like naked skin. He pitied her, and he pitied himself.
Yasunari Kawabata
#4. 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.
Yasunari Kawabata
#5. Lunatics have no age. If we were crazy, you and I, we might be a great deal younger.
Yasunari Kawabata
#6. Oh, to be laughed at when I have the courage to speak my heart. I don't want to live in a world like this."
-from "Diary of My Sixteenth Year
Yasunari Kawabata
#7. [ ... ] and yet the woman's existence, her straining to live, came touching him like naked skin.
Yasunari Kawabata
#8. The winter moon becomes a companion, the heart of the priest, sunk in meditation upon religion and philosophy, there in the mountain hall, is engaged in a delicate interplay and exchange with the moon; and it is this of which the poet sings.
Yasunari Kawabata
#9. A secret, if it's kept, can be sweet and comforting, but once it leaks out it can turn on you with a vengeance.
Yasunari Kawabata
#10. Again she lost herself in the talk, and again her words seemed to be warming her whole body.
Yasunari Kawabata
#11. From the way of Go the beauty of Japan and the Orient had fled. Everything had become science and regulation.
Yasunari Kawabata
#12. Now that Otoko had heard about the night at Enoshima, that old love flared up ominously within her. Yet in those flames she could see a single white lotus blossom. Their love was a dreamlike flower that not even Keiko could stain.
Yasunari Kawabata
#13. I gave myself up
to my tears. It was as though my head had turned to clear water, it was
falling pleasantly away drop by drop; soon nothing would remain.
Yasunari Kawabata
#14. If you wanna be somebody be yourself dont try to be anybody your not
Yasunari Kawabata
#15. The baby understands that its mother loves it. [ ... ] Words have their origin in baby talk, so words have their origin in love.
Yasunari Kawabata
#16. Father's life was only a very small part of the life of a tea bowl.
Yasunari Kawabata
#17. Does pain go away and leave no trace, then?'
'You sometimes even feel sentimental for it.
Yasunari Kawabata
#19. Her awareness of her body was inseparable from her memory of his embrace.
Yasunari Kawabata
#21. The labor into which a heart has poured its whole love
where will it have its say, to excite and inspire, and when?
Yasunari Kawabata
#22. Humankind, with its long history, is by now a corpse bound to a tree with the ropes of convention. If the ropes were cut, the corpse would simply fall to the ground. Prayer in one's mother tongue is a manifestation of that pathetic state."
-from "A Prayer in the Mother Tongue
Yasunari Kawabata
#23. Maybe vagueness has been good for me. The word means two different things in Tokyo and Osaka, you know. In Tokyo it means stupidity, but in Osaka they talk about vagueness in a painting and in a game of Go.
Yasunari Kawabata
#25. The high, thin nose was a little lonely, a little sad, but the bud of her lips opened and closed smoothly, like a beautiful little circle of leeches.
Yasunari Kawabata
#26. 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.
Yasunari Kawabata
#27. Her manner was as though she were talking of a distant foreign literature. There was something lonely, something sad in it, something that rather suggested a beggar who has lost all desire.
Yasunari Kawabata
#29. One can't stop and suddenly speak to a complete stranger, can one? ... When it happens I could die of sadness. I feel somehow empty and drained ...
Yasunari Kawabata
#30. In a gourd that had been handed down for three centuries, a flower that would fade in a morning.
Yasunari Kawabata
#32. And the Milky Way, like a great aurora, flowed through his body to stand at the edges of the earth. There was a quiet, chilly loneliness in it, and a sort of voluptuous astonishment.
Yasunari Kawabata
#33. Seeing the moon, he becomes the moon, the moon seen by him becomes him. He sinks into nature, becomes one with nature. The light of the "clear heart" of the priest, seated in the meditation hall in the darkness before the dawn, becomes for the dawn moon its own light.
Yasunari Kawabata
#34. He heard a sound that only a magnificent old bell could produce, a sound that seemed to roar forth with all the latent power of a distant world.
Yasunari Kawabata
#35. Here in our mountains, the snow falls even on the maple leaves.
Yasunari Kawabata
#36. Do you think it's right to not say goodbye to the man you yourself said was on the very first page of your very first volume of your diary? This is the very last page of his.
Yasunari Kawabata
#37. But a haiku by Buson came into his mind: 'I try to forget this senile love; a chilly autumn shower.' The gloom only grew denser.
Yasunari Kawabata
#38. A child walked by, rolling a metal hoop that made a sound of autumn.
Yasunari Kawabata
#39. You think I'm drunk and talking nonsense? I'm not. I would know she was being well taken care of, and I could go pleasantly to seed here in the mountains. It would be a fine, quiet feeling.
Yasunari Kawabata
#40. They were words that came out of nothing, but they seemed to him somehow significant. He muttered them over again.
Yasunari Kawabata
#41. Our language is primarily for expressing human goodness and beauty.
Yasunari Kawabata
#42. The course of one's life is a difficult thing."
-from "Diary of My Sixteenth Year
Yasunari Kawabata
#43. I could not bear the silences when the drum stopped. I sank down into the depths of the sound of the rain.
Yasunari Kawabata
#44. 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.
Yasunari Kawabata
#45. It's not right to live so long in this world only moving backward."
-from "Diary of My Sixteenth Year
Yasunari Kawabata
#46. Perhaps they don't realize where they were, so they went on living.
Yasunari Kawabata
#49. He had thought on the train of sending his head to a laundry, it was true, but he had been drawn not so much to the idea of the laundered head as to that of the sleeping body. A very pleasant sleep, with head detached.
Yasunari Kawabata
#50. The rich eyelashes again made him think that her eyes were half open.
Yasunari Kawabata
#51. When you die, there is nothing
only a life that will be forgotten."
-from "Gathering Ashes
Yasunari Kawabata
#52. You've always been fond of understanding people too well."
"They should arrange not to be understood quite so easily.
Yasunari Kawabata
#53. The snow on the distant mountains was soft and creamy, as if veiled in a faint smoke.
Yasunari Kawabata
#54. Put your soul in the palm of my hand for me to look at, like a crystal jewel. I'll sketch it in words ...
Yasunari Kawabata
#55. 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.
Yasunari Kawabata
#56. 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
Yasunari Kawabata
#58. 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.
Yasunari Kawabata
#59. After he became the Master, the world believed that he could not lose, and he had to believe it himself. Therein was the tragedy.
Yasunari Kawabata
#60. 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.
Yasunari Kawabata
#61. 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.
Yasunari Kawabata
#62. Your mother was such a gentle person. I always feel when I see someone like her that I'm watching the last flowers fall. This is no world for gentle people.
Yasunari Kawabata
#63. Time flows in the same way for all human beings; every human being flows through time in a different way.
Yasunari Kawabata
#65. As he caught his footing, his head fell back, and the Milky Way flowed down inside him with a roar.
Yasunari Kawabata
#66. A feeling of nagging, hopeless impotence came over Shimamura at the thought that a simple misunderstanding had worked its way so deep into the woman's being.
Yasunari Kawabata
#67. 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.
Yasunari Kawabata
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