Quotes from Sh?hei ?oka

Why was I not overcome with nausea? At the time I had no such reaction. Perhaps nausea is simply an unconscious device of the egoist, who, when he hears of horrors outside the course of his present serene existence, allows only his stomach to respond

in the distance across the dark fields I saw a flame. With the rainy season, the fireflies had long since disappeared. What then could this be? The flame flickered, now brightly, no dimly, and sometimes it glowed like a halo, as if it had sunk deep into water. I was frightened by this flame. For in my heart I, too, carried a flame.

The yearning in which the moonlit sky had engulfed me was like the craving I had felt for some woman whose body and spirit were unattainable. And now I perceived that it was just because the sky was likewise unattainable that I so yearned for it...

Allá iban, con mis escupitajos, los bacilos de la tuberculosis que había contraído en Japón y me alegraba imaginar esos bacilos agonizando abrazados bajo el sol tropical.

To be sure, my freedom lay simply in the fact that no one cared any longer where I went or what I did.

The familiar shape of the cross still gleamed above the distant forest, but now that I had found companions it no longer made any impression on me.

Walking along, I occasionally had to stop by the side of the road to spit out the mucus that kept rising in my throat. It rather pleased me to think of the malignant tubercle bacilli that I had brought from Japan being scorched to death under the tropical sun.