90 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.

When you’re held by the dead, you begin to feel that you aren’t in this world yourself.

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

As he caught his footing, his head fell back, and the Milky Way flowed down inside him with a roar.

Your ears are lovely, he said, but there’s a kind of eerie beauty to your profile.

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

La conciencia de su propio cuerpo era inseparable del recuerdo de aquel abrazo.

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.

But this love would leave behind it nothing so definite as a piece of Chijimi. Though cloth to be worn is among the most short-lived of craftworks, a good piece of Chijimi, if it has been taken care of, can be worn quite unfaded a half-century and more after weaving. As Shimamura thought absently how human intimacies have not even so long a life, the image of Komako as the mother of another man’s children suddenly floated into his mind. He looked around, startled. Possibly he was tired.