Christopher > Christopher's Quotes

“What I wanted was to die among strangers, untroubled, beneath a cloudless sky. And yet my desire differed from the sentiments of that ancient Greek who wanted to die under the brilliant sun. What I wanted was some natural, spontaneous suicide. I wanted a death like that of a fox, not yet well versed in cunning, that walks carelessly along a mountain path and is shot by a hunter because of its own stupidity…”
― Yukio Mishima, Confessions of a Mask

“When a boy… discovers that he is more given into introspection and consciousness of self than other boys his age, he easily falls into the error of believing it is because he is more mature than they. This was certainly a mistake in my case. Rather, it was because the other boys had no such need of understanding themselves as I had: they could be their natural selves, whereas I was to play a part, a fact that would require considerable understanding and study. So it was not my maturity but my sense of uneasiness, my uncertainty that was forcing me to gain control over my consciousness. Because such consciousness was simply a steppingstone to aberration and my present thinking was nothing but uncertain and haphazard guesswork.”
― Yukio Mishima, Confessions of a Mask

“...of all the kinds of decay in this world, decadent purity is the most malignant.”
― Yukio Mishima, Confessions of a Mask

“Mine was the unbearable jealousy a cultured pearl must feel toward a genuine one. Or can there be such a thing in this world as a man who is jealous of the woman who loves him, precisely because of her love?”
― Yukio Mishima, Confessions of a Mask

“Often there are two different reasons given for this natural desire to simplify. First is that we as humans have a very limited imagination and whichever medium we use to understand the world - be it science, religion, philosophy, or art -we will end up exploting the same limited set of ideas available to us.”
― Vlatko Vedral, Decoding Reality: The Universe as Quantum Information

“Pour yourself a drink, put on some lipstick, and pull yourself together.”
― Elizabeth Taylor