More Quotes by Yasunari Kawabata
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.
Because you cannot see him, God is everywhere.
The labor into which a heart has poured its whole love--where will it have its say, to excite and inspire, and when?
A secret, if it's kept, can be sweet and comforting, but once it leaks out it can turn on you with a vengeance.
The woman was silent, her eyes on the floor. Shimamura had come to a point where he knew he was only parading his masculine shamelessness, and yet it seemed likely enough that the woman was familiar with the failing and need not be shocked by it. He looked at her. Perhaps it was the rich lashes of the downcast eyes that made her face seem warm and sensuous. She shook her head very slightly, and again a faint blush spread over her face.
Our language is primarily for expressing human goodness and beauty.
The snow on the distant mountains was soft and creamy, as if veiled in a faint smoke.
In the depths of the mirror the evening landscape moved by, the mirror and the reflected figures like motion pictures superimposed one on the other. The figures and the background were unrelated, and yet the figures, transparent and intangible, and the background, dim in the gathering darkness, melted into a sort of symbolic world not of this world. Particularly when a light out in the mountains shone in the center of the girl's face, Shimamura felt his chest rise at the inexpressible beauty of it.
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.
I wonder what the retirement age is in the novel business. The day you die.
