Home > Author > Yasunari Kawabata
1 " Put your soul in the palm of my hand for me to look at, like a crystal jewel. I'll sketch it in words... "
― Yasunari Kawabata
2 " I wonder what the retirement age is in the novel business.The day you die. "
― Yasunari Kawabata , Beauty and Sadness
3 " Now, even more than the evening before, he could think of no one with whom to compare her. She had become absolute, beyond comparison. She had become decision and fate. "
― Yasunari Kawabata , Thousand Cranes
4 " Yet the misty spring rain softened the outline of the mountain across the river and made it even more beautiful. So gentle was the rain that they hardly knew they were getting wet as they strolled back toward the car, not even bothering to put up their umbrella. The slender threads of rain vanished into the river without a ripple. Cherry blossoms were intermingled with young green leaves, the colours of the budding trees all delicately subdued in the rain. "
5 " No, it didn't hurt. He didn't want to lose any black hair, and he was careful to pull out the white hairs one by one. But when he had finished, the skin was drawn and shriveled. It hurt when you ran your hand over it, the doctor said. It didn't bleed, but it was raw and red. Finally he was put in a mental hospital. . . He didn't want to be old, he wanted to be young again. No one seems to know whether he started pulling it out because he had lost his mind, or he lost his mind because he pulled out too much. "
6 " People have separated from each other with walls of concrete that blocked the roads to connection and love. and Nature has been defeated in the name of development. "
7 " The road was frozen. The village lay quiet under the cold sky. Komako hitched up the skirt of her kimono and tucked it into her obi. The moon shone like a blade frozen in blue ice. "
― Yasunari Kawabata , Snow Country
8 " Her kimono stood out from her neck,and her back and shoulders were like a white fan spread under it. There was something sad about the full flesh under that white powder. It suggested a woolen cloth,and again it suggested the pelt of some animal. "
9 " The true joy of a moonlit night is something we no longer understand. Only the men of old, when there were no lights, could understand the true joy of a moonlit night. "
― Yasunari Kawabata , Palm-of-the-Hand Stories
10 " Was this the bright vastness the poet Bashō saw when he wrote of the Milky Way arched over a stormy sea? "
11 " But even more than her diary, Shimamura was surprised at her statement that she had carefully cataloged every novel and short story she had read since she was fifteen or sixteen. The record already filled ten notebooks."You write down your criticisms, do you?""I could never do anything like that. I just write down the author and the characters and how they are related to each other. That is about all.""But what good does it do?""None at all.""A waste of effort.""A complete waste of effort," she answered brightly, as though the admission meant little to her. She gazed solemnly at Shimamura, however.A complete waste of effort. For some reason Shimamura wanted to stress the point. But, drawn to her at that moment, he felt a quiet like the voice of the rain flow over him. He knew well enough that for her it was in fact no waste of effort, but somehow the final determination that it had the effect of distilling and purifying the woman's existence. "
12 " From the way of Go the beauty of Japan and the Orient had fled. Everything had become science and regulation. "
― Yasunari Kawabata , The Master of Go
13 " Your ears are lovely, he said, but there's a kind of eerie beauty to your profile. "
14 " Cosmic time is the same for everyone, but human time differs with each person. Time flows in the same way for all human beings; every human being flows through time in a different way. "
15 " In the moonlight the fine geishalike skin took on the luster of a seashell. "
16 " Now that he was near her, this sighing of the human skin took on a dreamlike quality like the spell of the mountains. "
17 " The Milky Way came down just over there, to wrap the night earth in its naked embrace. There was a terrible voluptuousness about it. "
18 " 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. "
― Yasunari Kawabata , House of the Sleeping Beauties and Other Stories
19 " Un dia, mientras escribia una carta, Otoko abrio el diccionario para consultar el ideograma 'pensar'. Al repasar los restantes significados (añorar, ser incapaz de olvidar, estar triste) sintio que el corazon se le encogia. Tuvo miedo de tocar el diccionario... Aun ahi estaba Oki. Innumerables palabras se lo recordaban. Vincular todo lo que veia y oia con su amor equivalia a estar viva. La conciencia de su propio cuerpo era inseparable del recuerdo de aquel abrazo. "
20 " We were watching a battle, but it took clean forms. "
