Yasunari Kawabata > Quotes

“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 was had the effect of distilling and purifying the woman's existence.”
― Yasunari Kawabata, Snow Country

“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

“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

“They were words that came out of nothing, but they seemed to him somehow significant. He muttered them over again.”
― Yasunari Kawabata, The Sound of the Mountain

“The woman was silent, her eyes on the floor. Shimamura had come to a point where he knew he was only parading his masculine shamelessness, and yet it seemed likely enough that the woman was familiar with the failing and need not be shocked by it. He looked at her. Perhaps it was the rich lashes of the downcast eyes that made her face seem warm and sensuous. She shook her head very slightly, and again a faint blush spread over her face.”
― Yasunari Kawabata, Snow Country

“In the depths of the mirror the evening landscape moved by, the mirror and the reflected figures like motion pictures superimposed one on the other. The figures and the background were unrelated, and yet the figures, transparent and intangible, and the background, dim in the gathering darkness, melted into a sort of symbolic world not of this world. Particularly when a light out in the mountains shone in the centre of the girl's face, Shimamura felt his chest rise at the inexpressible beauty of it.”
― Yasunari Kawabata, Snow Country

“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 was had the effect of distilling and purifying the woman's existence.”
― Yasunari Kawabata, Snow Country

“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.”
― Yasunari Kawabata

“En el mundo habia gente tan parecida entre si que se los podria tomar por padres e hijos. Pero dificilmente existieran muchos en el mundo. Ta vez hubiera un solo hombres que pudiera corresponderse con una muchacha y una sola joven que combinara con un hombre. Solo uno para algun otro; y tal vez en todo el mundo una sola pareja posible. Viven como extranos, sin supone ningun tipo de lazo entre ellos y hasta ignorantes de la existencia del otro.
Por casualidad suben a mismo tren, se reunen por primera vez y probablemente nunca vuelvan a encontrarse. Treinta minutos en el curso de toda una vida. Se separan sin decirse una palabra. Habiendo estado sentados uno al lado del otro, sin mirarse, sin darse cuenta del parecido, se alejan siendo parte de un milagro del que no tomaron conciencia.
Y el unico admirado por la rareza de todo eso es un extrano que se pregunta si, al ser un accidental testigo no estara participando de un milagro.”
― Yasunari Kawabata

“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.”
― Yasunari Kawabata, Lo bello y lo triste

“El tiempo paso. Pero el tiempo se divide en muchas corrientes. Como en un rio, hay una corriente central rapida en algunos sectores y lenta, hasta inmovil, en otros. El tiempo cosmico es igual para todos, pero el tiempo humano difiere con cada persona. El tiempo corre de la misma manera para todos los seres humanos; pero todo ser humano flota de distinta manera en el tiempo.”
― Yasunari Kawabata, Lo bello y lo triste

“Because you cannot see him, God is everywhere.”
― Yasunari Kawabata

“I wonder what the retirement age is in the novel business.

The day you die.”
― Yasunari Kawabata, Beauty and Sadness

“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

“إن العمل الشائن المقترف يرتبط بمقترفه، ويحكم عليه باقتراف أعمال شائنة أخرى، هكذا تتكون العادات السيئة.”
― Yasunari Kawabata, The Lake

“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

“¿Pero cuánto durará esta belleza? A las mujeres nos entristece pensar en eso”
― Yasunari Kawabata, Beauty and Sadness

“Manusia yang tak mau gelisah, sesungguhnya dia telah mati”
― Yasunari Kawabata

“It was a stern night landscape. The sound of the freezing of snow over the land seemed to roar deep into the earth. There was no moon. 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. As the stars came nearer, the sky retreated deeper and deeper into the night clolour. The layers of the Border Range, indistinguishable one from another, cast their heaviness at the skirt of the starry sky in a blackness grave and somber enough to communicate their mass. The whole of the night scene came together in a clear, tranquil harmony.”
― Yasunari Kawabata, Snow Country

“Even if you have the wit to look by yourself in a bush away from the other children, there are not many bell crickets in the world. Probably you will find a girl like a grasshopper whom you think is a bell cricket.

And finally, to your clouded, wounded heart, even a true bell cricket will seem like a grasshopper. Should that day come, when it seems to you that the world is only full of grasshoppers, I will think it a pity that you have no way to remember tonight’s play of light, when your name was written in green by your beautiful lantern on a girl’s breast.”
― Yasunari Kawabata

“A child walked by, rolling a metal hoop that made a sound of autumn.”
― Yasunari Kawabata, Palm-of-the-Hand Stories

“Was this the bright vastness the poet Bashō saw when he wrote of the Milky Way arched over a stormy sea?”
― Yasunari Kawabata, Snow Country

“Is it a boy or a girl?"
"It's a girl. Really! Can't you tell by looking at it?
"Is it mine?"
"It is not."
"Oh? Well, if it is, you needn't say so now. You can say when you feel like it. Years and years from now."
"It is not. It really is not. I haven't forgotten that I loved you, but you are not to imagine things.”
― Yasunari Kawabata

“The labor into which a heart has poured its whole love--where will it have its say, to excite and inspire, and when?”
― Yasunari Kawabata

“She was afraid to touch the dictionary � Oki was even there. Innumerable words reminded her of him. To link whatever she saw and heard with her love was nothing less than to be alive. Her awareness of her body was inseparable from her memory of his embrace.”
― Yasunari Kawabata, Beauty and Sadness

“She could not say why these rather inconspicuous green slopes had so touched her heart, when along the railway line there were mountains, lakes, the sea at times even clouds dyed in sentimental colors. But perhaps their melancholy green, and the melancholy evening shadows of the ridges across them, had brought on the pain. Then too, they were small, well-groomed slopes with deeply shaded ridges, not nature in the wild; and the rows of rounded tea bushes looked like flocks of gentle green sheep.”
― Yasunari Kawabata, Beauty and Sadness

“...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.”
― Yasunari Kawabata, Beauty and Sadness

“The snow on the distant mountains was soft and creamy, as if veiled in a faint smoke.”
― Yasunari Kawabata, Snow Country