Acts of Worship Quotes

“Someone, somewhere, had tied up the darkness, he thought as he went: the bag of darkness had been tied at the mouth, enclosing within it a host of smaller bags. The stars were tiny, almost imperceptible perforations; otherwise, there wasn't a single hole through which light could pass.
The darkness in which he walked immersed was gradually pervading him. His own footfall was utterly remote, his presence barely rippled the air. His being had been compressed to the utmost - to the point where it had no need to forge a path for itself through the night, but could weave its way through the gaps between the particles of which the darkness was composed.”
― Yukio Mishima, Acts of Worship: Seven Stories

“Held in the custody of childhood is a locked chest; the adolescent, by one means or another, tries to open it. The chest is opened: inside, there is nothing. So he reaches a conclusion: the treasure chest is always like this, empty. From this point on, he gives priority to this assumption of his rather than to his reality. In other words, he is now a “grown-up.” Yet was the chest really empty? Wasn’t there something vital, something invisible to the eye, that got away at the very moment it was opened?”
― Yukio Mishima, Acts of Worship: Seven Stories

“To be strong and true had been the most important task he had set himself since early childhood.
Once, as a boy, he had tried to outstare the sun. But before he could tell whether he had really looked at it or not, changes had occurred: the blazing red ball that had been there at first began to whirl, then suddenly dimmed, till it became a cold, bluish-black, flattened disk of iron. He felt he had seen the very essence of the sun....
For a while, wherever he looked he saw the sun's pale afterimage: in the undergrowth; in the shade beneath the trees; even, when he gazed up, in every part of the sky.
The truth was something too dazzling to be looked at directly. And yet, once it had come into one's field of vision, one saw patches of light in all kinds of places: the afterimages of virtue.”
― Yukio Mishima, Acts of Worship: Seven Stories

“It’s odd how one’s memories of youth turn out so bleak. Why does the business of growing up—one’s recollections of growth itself—have to be so tragic? I still haven’t found the answer. I doubt if anybody has. When I finally reach that stage at which the placid wisdom of old age... occasionally descends on a person, then I too may suddenly discover that I understand. But I doubt whether, by that time, understanding will have much point.”
― Yukio Mishima, Acts of Worship: Seven Stories

“Why, when solitude howling like the sea bestrode the gaudy lights of the nocturnal city, should one proceed to dance?”
― Yukio Mishima, Acts of Worship: Seven Stories

“Jack failed to understand Peter's excitement. Why, exactly, was he dancing? Because he was dissatisfied about something? Because he was happy? Or because it was at least better than killing himself?...

What exactly did Peter believe in, wondered Jack in his transparency, watching Peter's body dancing, glinting, in the light of the bonfire. Had it all been lies, then - what Peter had once told him of the misery that settled on him every night like a heavy, sodden wad of cotton? Why, when solitude howling like the sea bestrode the gaudy lights of the nocturnal city, should one proceed to dance?

That was the point, Jack himself was convinced, at which everything stopped. He, at least, had stopped. And then, little by little, he had become transparent....”
― Yukio Mishima, Acts of Worship: Seven Stories

“Why, exactly, was he dancing? Because he was dissatisfied about something? Because he was happy? Or because it was at least better than killing himself?...”
― Yukio Mishima, Acts of Worship: Seven Stories