Yukio Mishima Quotes

“Dreams, memories, the sacred – they are all alike in that they are beyond our grasp. Once we are even marginally separated from what we can touch, the object is sanctified; it acquires the beauty of the unattainable, the quality of the miraculous.

Everything, really, has this quality of sacredness, but we can desecrate it at a touch. How strange man is! His touch defiles and yet he contains the source of miracles.”

“Even when we're with someone we love, we're foolish enough to think of her body and soul as being separate. To stand before the person we love is not the same as loving her true self, for we are only apt to regard her physical beauty as the indispensable mode of her existence.

When time and space intervene, it is possible to be deceived by both, but on the other hand, it is equally possible to draw twice as close to her real self.”

“He felt that taking naps was much more beneficial than confronting catastrophes.”

“He had never looked forward to the wisdom and other vaunted benefits of old age. Would he be able to die young—and if possible free of all pain?

A graceful death — as a richly patterned kimono, thrown carelessly across a polished table, slides unobtrusively down into the darkness of the floor beneath. A death marked by elegance.”

“His conviction of having no purpose in life other than to act as a distillation of poison was part of the ego of an eighteen-year-old. He had resolved that his beautiful white hands would never be soiled or calloused. He wanted to be like a pennant, dependent on each gusting wind.

The only thing that seemed valid to him was to live for the emotions – gratuitous and unstable, dying only to quicken again, dwindling and flaring without direction or purpose.”

“I've known supreme happiness, and I'm not greedy enough to want what I have to go on forever. Every dream ends.

Wouldn't it be foolish, knowing that nothing lasts forever, to insist that one has a right to do something that does?

But, if eternity existed, it would be this moment.”

“Just now I had a dream. I'll see you again. I know it. Beneath the falls.”

“Time is what matters. As time goes by, you and I will be carried inexorably into the mainstream of our period, even though we’re unaware of what it is.

And later, when they say that young men in the early Taisho era thought, dressed, talked, in such and such a way, they’ll be talking about you and me. We’ll all be lumped together.

In a few decades, people will see you and the people you despise as one and the same, a single entity.”