19 Quotes by Junichiro Tanizaki

It is hard for one who has not had a similar experience to imagine the terror that still gripped Taeko and Mrs. Tamaki and Hiroshi, so intense a terror that afterwards it seemed almost funny.

من از این جهان که در آن سایه ها از بین می روند به ادبیات پناه می برم.

We Orientals find beauty not only in the thing itself but in the pattern of the shadows, the light and darkness which that thing provides.

Whenever I sit with a bowl of soup before me, listening to the murmur that penetrates like the distant song of an insect, lost in contemplation of the flavours to come, I feel as if I were being drawn into a trance

The older we get the more we seem to think that everything was better in the past.

There are those who say that when civilization progresses a bit further transportation facilities will move into the skies and under the ground, and that our streets will again be quiet, but I know perfectly well that when that day comes some new device for torturing the old will be invented.

Were it not for shadows, there would be no beauty.

The ancients waited for cherry blossoms, grieved when they were gone, and lamented their passing in countless poems. How very ordinary the poems had seemed to Sachiko when she read them as a girl, but now she knew, as well as one could know, that grieving over fallen cherry blossoms was more than a fad or convention.

For a woman who lived in the dark it was enough if she had a faint, white face -a full body was unnecessary.