90 Quotes by Yasunari Kawabata

Does pain go away and leave no trace, then?’ ‘You sometimes even feel sentimental for it.

Along the coast the sea roars, and inland the mountains roar – the roaring at the center, like a distant clap of thunder.

Nothing could be more comfortable than writing about the ballet from books. A ballet he had never seen was an art in another world. It was an unrivaled armchair reverie, a lyric from some paradise. He called his work research, but it was actually free, uncontrolled fantasy. He preferred not to savor the ballet in the flesh; rather he savored the phantasms of his own dancing imagination, called up by Western books and pictures. It was like being in love with someone he had never seen.

The high, thin nose was a little lonely, a little sad, but the bud of her lips opened and closed smoothly, like a beautiful little circle of leeches.

Your mother was such a gentle person. I always feel when I see someone like her that I’m watching the last flowers fall. This is no world for gentle people.

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

He could not call up the faces of his own mother and father, who had died three or four years before. He would look at a picture, and there they would be. Perhaps people were progressively harder to paint in the mind as they near one, loved by one. Perhaps clear memories came easily in proportion as they were ugly.

This is no world for gentle people.

Do you think it’s right to not say goodbye to the man you yourself said was on the very first page of your very first volume of your diary? This is the very last page of his.