Yasunari Kawabata Quotes

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.

Our language is primarily for expressing human goodness and beauty.

The labor into which a heart has poured its whole love--where will it have its say, to excite and inspire, and when?

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.

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

Because you cannot see him, God is everywhere.

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.

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

A secret, if it's kept, can be sweet and comforting, but once it leaks out it can turn on you with a vengeance.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

The snow on the distant mountains was soft and creamy, as if veiled in a faint smoke.

And I can't complain. After all, only women are able really to love.

A child walked by, rolling a metal hoop that made a sound of autumn.

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

From the way of Go the beauty of Japan and the Orient had fled. Everything had become science and regulation.

The sound of the freezing of snow over the land seemed to roar deep into the earth. There was no moon. 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. As the stars came nearer, the sky retreated deeper and deeper into the night color. The layers of the Border Range, indistinguishable one from another, cast their heaviness at the skirt of the starry sky in a blackness grave and somber enough to communicate their mass. The whole of the night scene came together in a clear, tranquil harmony.

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

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.