The Decay of the Angel Quotes

“كل ما لديه حقاً كان شعوراً جارفاً بالحماقة وبالابتذال, وقد ذاب متحولاً إلى رتابة. كم هي هائلة تجليات العادي والمبتذل! ابتذال التأنق, ابتذال العاج, ابتذال القداسة, ابتذال الجنون, ابتذال ذوي المعرفة الواسعة, ابتذال الأكاديمي المدعي, الابتذال المغناج, ابتذال القطة الفارسية, ابتذال الملوك والشحاذين والمعتوهين والفراشات.”
― Yukio Mishima, The Decay of the Angel

“كان الاضطرار إلى الحياة أكثر سواداً من أشد ضروب السواد افتقاراً للمرح, أن يضطر كل يوم لرؤية رجل يسعى لفهم أعمق شيء بداخله, وينجح في ذلك.”
― Yukio Mishima, The Decay of the Angel

“The perfectly ordinary girl and the great philosopher are alike: for both, the smallest triviality can become the vision that wipes out the world.”
― Yukio Mishima, The Decay of the Angel

“History knew the truth. History was the most inhuman product of humanity. It scooped up the whole of human will and, like the goddess Kali in Calcutta, dripped blood from its mouth as it bit and crunched.”
― Yukio Mishima, The Decay of the Angel

“There is nothing in the least special about you. I guarantee you a long life. You have not been chosen by the gods, you will never be at one with your acts, you do not have in you the green light to flash like young lightning with the speed of the gods and destroy yourself. All you have is a certain premature senility. Your life will be suited for coupon-clipping. Nothing more.”
― Yukio Mishima, The Decay of the Angel

“No, Mr. Honda, I have forgotten none of the blessings that were mine in the other world. But I fear I have never heard the name Kiyoaki Matsugae. Don’t you suppose, Mr. Honda, that there never was such a person? You seem convinced that there was; but don’t you suppose that there was no such person from the beginning, anywhere? I couldn’t help thinking so as I listened to you.”
“Why then do we know each other? And the Ayakuras and the Matsugaes must still have family registers.”
“Yes, such documents might solve problems in the other world. But did you really know a person called Kiyoaki? And can you say definitely that the two of us have met before?”
“I came here sixty years ago.”
“Memory is like a phantom mirror. It sometimes shows things too distant to be seen, and sometimes it shows them as if they were here.”
“But if there was no Kiyoaki from the beginning—” Honda was groping through a fog. His meeting here with the Abbess seemed half a dream. He spoke loudly, as if to retrieve the self that receded like traces of breath vanishing from a lacquer tray. “If there was no Kiyoaki, then there was no Isao. There was no Ying Chan, and who knows, perhaps there has been no I.”
For the first time there was strength in her eyes.
“That too is as it is in each heart.”
― Yukio Mishima, The Decay of the Angel

“I have been self-reliant to the point of sadness. I wonder when I first fell into the habit of washing my hands after each brush with humanity, lest I be contaminated.”
― Yukio Mishima, The Decay of the Angel

“That is because the most subtle and delicate wishes of evil are not for a physical wound but for a spiritual.”
― Yukio Mishima, The Decay of the Angel

“We are too accustomed to the absurdity of existence. The loss of a universe is not worth taking seriously.”
― Yukio Mishima, The Decay of the Angel

“If the cause of decay was illness, then the fundamental cause of that, the flesh, was illness too. The essence of the flesh was decay. It had its spot in time to give evidence of destruction and decay.”
― Yukio Mishima, The Decay of the Angel

“.... كل ما هنالك ان احداً لم يلحظ الأمر، فنحن أكثر تعوداً مما ينبغي .على عبث الوجود. و ضياع كون ليس جديراً ان يحمل على محمل الجد”
― Yukio Mishima, The Decay of the Angel

“He was in a room of the Gesshuuji, which he had thought it would be impossible to visit. The approach of death had made the visit easy, had unloosed the weight that held him in the depths of being. It was even a comfort to think, from the light repose the struggle up the hill had brought him, that Kiyoaki, struggling against illness up that same road, had been given wings to soar with by the denial that awaited him.”
― Yukio Mishima, The Decay of the Angel

“It was a bright, quiet garden, without striking features. Like a rosary rubbed between the hands, the shrilling of cicadas held sway. There was no other sound. The garden was empty. He had come, thought Honda, to a place that had no memories, nothing. The noontide sun of summer flowed over the still garden.”
― Yukio Mishima, The Decay of the Angel

“People do not love pets that will outlive them. A short life is a condition for love.”
― Yukio Mishima, The Decay of the Angel

“There was for me nothing that might have been called the pinnacle of my youth, and so no moment for stopping it. One should stop at the pinnacle. I could discern none. Strangely, I feel no regrets.”
― Yukio Mishima, The Decay of the Angel

“La memoria è lo specchio degli inganni”
― Yukio Mishima, The Decay of the Angel

“There was no other sound. The garden was empty. He had come, thought Honda, to a place with no memories, nothing.

The noontide sun of summer flowered over the still garden.”
― Yukio Mishima, The Decay of the Angel

“No one can know what a sacrifice it is for me to be gentle and docile.”
― Yukio Mishima, The Decay of the Angel

“I am very cautious, but I am greatly wanting in the instinct for self-preservation. And I am so brightly wanting in it that the breeze through the gap sometimes makes me drunk.”
― Yukio Mishima, The Decay of the Angel

“Honda had been looking forward to the crape myrtle in bloom, its blossoms shining against a trunk smooth like the white skin of a leper. But there was none. The garden had been made over, he knew, in the Alaya, the Storehouse, into a different garden. Gardens too must change. But in the instant that he so felt, uncontrollable anger came from another source. He cried out, and even as he cried out he was afraid.”
― Yukio Mishima, The Decay of the Angel

“Honda had been looking forward to the crape myrtle in bloom, it’s blossoms shining against a trunk smooth like the white skin of a leper. But there was none. The garden had been made over, he knew, in the Alaya, the Storehouse, into a different garden. Gardens too must change. But in the instant that he so felt, uncontrollable anger came from another source. He cried out, and even as he cried he was afraid.”
― Yukio Mishima, The Decay of the Angel

“The sea was a dull, monotonous green. Slowly, the tide was coming in.

Tōru lowered the telescope to the waves of the beach.
As they broke, a spray like the dregs of the sea slipped from their backs, and the pyramids of deep green changed, rose and swelled into an uneasy white. The sea lost its serenity.

Even as it rose it broke at the skirts, and ragged spots of white from its high belly like a call of inexpressible sorrow became a sharply smooth yet infinitely cracked wall of glass, like a vast spray. As it rose and broke, the forelocks were combed a beautiful white, and as it fell it showed the neatly arrayed blue-white of its crown, and the lines of white became a solid field of white; and so it fell, like a severed head.

The spray and the falling away of foam. Little patches of foam trailing off to sea like lines of water bugs.

From trailing off over the sand like swear from the back of an athlete at the end of his exertions.

What delicate changes passed over the white monolith of the sea as it came in upon the shore and broke. The myriad confusion of thin waves and the fine partings of the foam became in desperation an infinity of lines spewed out over the sea as from silkworms. What a subtle evil, overcoming by sheer force even as it took into itself this delicate white.”
― Yukio Mishima, The Decay of the Angel

“Multiple changes in the color of the sea, moment by moment. Changes in the clouds. And the appearance of a ship. What was happening? What were happenings?
Each instant brought them, more momentous than the explosion of Krakatoa. It was only that no one noticed. We are too accustomed to the absurdity of existence. The loss of a universe is not worth taking seriously.
Happenings are the signals for endless reconstruction, reorganization. Signals from a distant bell. A ship appears and sets the bell to ringing. In an instant the sound makes everything its own. On the sea they are incessant, the bell forever ringing.”
― Yukio Mishima, The Decay of the Angel

“That is because one must proceed from clarity, and the smallest element of miscalculation produces fantasy, and fantasy produces beauty.”
― Yukio Mishima, The Decay of the Angel

“He integrado una delicada maquinaria para averiguar lo que sentiría de ser humano.”
― Yukio Mishima, The Decay of the Angel

“go-go hall on my way home from school.”
― Yukio Mishima, The Decay of the Angel: The Sea of Fertility, 4