True beauty is something that attacks, overpowers, robs, and finally destroys.
Perfect purity is possible if you turn your life into a line of poetry written with a splash of blood.
Beauty is something that burns the hand when you touch it.
Young people get the foolish idea that what is new for them must be new for everybody else too. No matter how unconventional they get, they're just repeating what others before them have done.
Nobody even imagines how well one can lie about the state of one’s own heart.
Possessing by letting go of things was a secret of ownership unknown to youth.
We live in an age in which there is no heroic death.
When silence is prolonged over a certain period of time, it takes on new meaning.
The special quality of hell is to see everything clearly down to the last detail.
I still have no way to survive but to keep writing one line, one more line, one more line...
We are not wounded so deeply when betrayed by the things we hope for as when betrayed by things we try our best to despise. In such betrayal comes the dagger in the back.
Anything can become excusable when seen from the standpoint of the result
If the world changed, i could not exist, and if i changed, the world could not exist
...living is merely the chaos of existence...
The instant that the blade tore open his flesh, the bright disk of the sun soared up and exploded behind his eyelids.
A samurai is a total human being, whereas a man who is completely absorbed in his technical skill has degenerated into a ‘function’, one cog in a machine.
...of all the kinds of decay in this world, decadent purity is the most malignant.
Other people must be destroyed. In order that I might truly face the sun, the world itself must be destroyed....
Mine was the unbearable jealousy a cultured pearl must feel toward a genuine one. Or can there be such a thing in this world as a man who is jealous of the woman who loves him, precisely because of her love?
There isn't any fear in existence itself, or any uncertainty, but living creates it.
There's a huge seal called 'impossibility' pasted all over this world. And don't ever forget that we're the only ones who can tear it off once and for all.
When people concentrate on the idea of beauty, they are, without realizing it, confronted with the darkest thoughts that exist in this world. That, I suppose, is how human beings are made.
For clearly it is impossible to touch eternity with one hand and life with the other.
History knew the truth. History was the most inhuman product of humanity.It scooped up the whole of human will and, like the goddess Kali in Calcutta, dripped blood from its mouth as it bit and crunched.
A man isn't tiny or giant enough to defeat anything
He felt that taking naps was much more beneficial than confronting catastrophes.
For a long time I had not approached the forbidden fruit called happiness, but it was now tempting me with a melancholy persistence. I felt as though Sonoko were an abyss above which I stood poised.
I cried sobbingly until at last those visions reeking with blood came to comfort me. And then I surrendered myself to them, to those deplorably brutal visions, my most intimate friends.
Still immersed in his dream, he drank down the tepid tea. It tasted bitter. Glory, as anyone knows, is bitter stuff.
The cynicism that regards hero worship as comical is always shadowed by a sense of physical inferiority
It is a rather risky matter to discuss a happiness that has no need of words.
Again and again, the cicada’s untiring cry pierced the sultry summer air like a needle at work on thick cotton cloth.
Human life is limited but I would like to live forever.
For me, beauty is always retreating from one’s grasp: the only thing I consider important is what existed once, or ought to have existed.
It is a common failing of childhood to think that if one makes a hero out of a demon the demon will be satisfied.
No human being can be so honest as to become completely false.
All six of us are geniuses. And the world, as you know, is empty.
Thus in a single phrase I can define the great illusion concerning 'love' in this world. It is the effort to join reality with the apparition.
Human beings, Isao realized, could descend to communicating their feelings like dogs barking in the distance on a cold night.
A father is a reality-concealing machine, a machine for dishing up lies to kids, and that isn't even the worst of it: secretly he believes that he represents reality.
We human beings sometimes steer off in a direction in which we hope to find something a little bit better.
The parting, like the white fruit of an apple discolouring instantly around the bite, had begun three days before when they had met aboard the Rakuyo.
It seemed that hell could appear day or night, at any time, at any place, simply in response to one's thoughts or wishes. It seemed that we could summon it at our pleasure and that instantly it would appear.
There is no virtue in curiosity. In fact, it might even be the most immoral desire a man can possess.
Beyond doubt it would speedily verify the proverb that a nation must ravage itself before foreigners can ravage it, a man must despise himself before others can despise him.
Let the darkness that is in my heart become equal to the darkness of the night that surrounds those innumerable lights!
Everybody's the same. People are all the same. But it’s the prerogative of youth to think it’s not so.
…In the very simplicity of her desire to punish herself appeared egoism in its purest form. Never before had this woman who seemed to think only of herself experienced an egoism so immaculate.
We all know that the world is empty and that the important thing, the only thing, is to try to maintain order in that emptiness.
Just now I had a dream. I'll see you again. I know it. Beneath the falls.
The perfectly ordinary girl and the great philosopher are alike: for both, the smallest triviality can become the vision that wipes out the world.
Because the fact of not being understood by other people had become my only real source of pride, I was never confronted by any impulse to express things and to make others understand something that I knew.
I want to make a poem of my life.
Glory, as anyone knows, is bitter stuff.
Separation is painful, but so is its opposite. And if being together brings joy, then it is only proper that separation should do the same in its own way.
Most writers are perfectly normal in the head and just carry on like wild men; I behave normally but I'm sick inside.
The philosophy that prepares a revolution and the sentiment that underpins the philosophy have, in every case the two pillars of nihilism and mysticism.
Insensitive people are only upset when they actually see the blood, but actually by the time that the blood has been shed the tragedy has already completed.
True pain can only come gradually. It is exactly like tuberculosis in that the disease has already progressed to a critical stage before the patient becomes aware of its symptoms.
However, as words become particularized, and as men begin - in however small a way - to use them in personal, arbitrary ways, so their transformation into art begins.
They had laid the tender, down-ruffled little bird on a platter and appeared now to be pondering a way to eat out its heart without causing it distress.
This time, Fusako was able to express herself with fluency and candor. The bold letters she had been writing week after week had granted her an unexpected new freedom.
And it seemed increasingly obvious that the world would have to topple if he was to attain the glory that was rightfully his. They were consubstantial: glory and the capsized world.
That which proceeds from a man’s soul shall shape his soul; that which proceeds from his speech shall shape his speech, and deeds that proceed from his body shall shape his body.
Most people are always doubtful as to whether they are happy or not, cheerful or not. This is the normal state of happiness, as doubt is a most natural thing.
But this girl simply let my hands gather on her own small, plump hands, like flies gathering on someone who is taking a nap.
I was born with gloomy nature. I do not think I have ever known what it is to be cheerful and at ease.
Better to be caught in sudden, complete catastrophe than to be gnawed by the cancer of imagination.
He never made fun of her as her neighbors did. That was why she visited him. He felt in this mad, ugly woman five years his senior a comrade in apartness. He liked people who refused to recognize the world.
Those words of my friend were like fertilizer poured over the poisonous weed of an idea deeply planted in me.
As long as conscious desire is at work, it will permit distinctions to exist. But if one can suppress it, these distinctions dissolve and one can be as content with a skull as with anything else.
You're not human. You're a being who is incapable of social intercourse. You're nothing but a creature, non-human and somehow strangely pathetic.
Why are we all burdened with the duty to destroy everything, change everything, entrust everything to impermanency? Is it this unpleasant duty that the world calls life?
What more could I have done when I did not know that to love is both to seek and to be sought? For me love was nothing but a dialogue of little riddles, with no answers given.
Prudery is a form of selfishness, a means of self-protection made necessary by the strength of one's own desires.
Otaguro’s bosom heaved with an ineffable surge of joy. “Every man is fighting,” he murmured. “Every man.
The only people in this world I really trust are my fans - even if they do forget you so fast.
One could certainly think of a man not in terms of a body but as a single vital current. And this would allow one to grasp the concept of existence as dynamic and on-going, rather than as static.
Her nose was perfect; her lips exquisite. Like a master placing a go stone on the board after long deliberation, he placed the details of her beauty one by one in the misty dark and drew back to savour them.
