Yasunari Kawabata Quotes

I could not bear the silences when the drum stopped. I sank down into the depths of the sound of the rain.

After all, only women are able really to love.

Time flows in the same way for all human beings; every human being flows through time in a different way.

Because you cannot see him, God is everywhere.

This is no world for gentle people

The baby understands that its mother loves it. [ ... ] Words have their origin in baby talk, so words have their origin in love.

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

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

THE TRAIN came out of the long tunnel into the snow country.

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.

Father's life was only a very small part of the life of a tea bowl.

But a haiku by Buson came into his mind: 'I try to forget this senile love; a chilly autumn shower.' The gloom only grew denser.

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

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

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

Here in our mountains, the snow falls even on the maple leaves.

The rich eyelashes again made him think that her eyes were half open.

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

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

One can't stop and suddenly speak to a complete stranger, can one? ... When it happens I could die of sadness. I feel somehow empty and drained ...

Perhaps they don't realize where they were, so they went on living.

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

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

Stop. I don't like it. I don't like having people die.

It's not right to live so long in this world only moving backward."

-from "Diary of My Sixteenth Year

In a gourd that had been handed down for three centuries, a flower that would fade in a morning.

Again she lost herself in the talk, and again her words seemed to be warming her whole body.

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.

Her awareness of her body was inseparable from her memory of his embrace.

After he became the Master, the world believed that he could not lose, and he had to believe it himself. Therein was the tragedy.

If you wanna be somebody be yourself dont try to be anybody your not

Thinking to be tactful and adroit, the woman stood

Anyway, it's hardly a problem worth worrying about.

Even when natural weather is good, human weather is bad.

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

You've always been fond of understanding people too well."
"They should arrange not to be understood quite so easily.

The course of one's life is a difficult thing."

-from "Diary of My Sixteenth Year

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

Our language is primarily for expressing human goodness and beauty.

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

He heard a sound that only a magnificent old bell could produce, a sound that seemed to roar forth with all the latent power of a distant world.

When you die, there is nothing
only a life that will be forgotten."
-from "Gathering Ashes

Oh, to be laughed at when I have the courage to speak my heart. I don't want to live in a world like this."
-from "Diary of My Sixteenth Year

Put your soul in the palm of my hand for me to look at, like a crystal jewel. I'll sketch it in words ...

[ ... ] and yet the woman's existence, her straining to live, came touching him like naked skin.

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