Quotes from Jun'ichir? Tanizaki

The quality that we call beauty, however, must always grow from the realities of life, and our ancestors, forced to live in dark rooms, presently came to discover beauty in shadows, ultimately to guide shadows towards beauty's ends.

But does a decent man make promises just to please a woman? Isn't it more honest to refuse to?" "I don't like that sort of honesty. It's not honesty, it's lack of steadiness.

In making for ourselves a place to live, we first spread a parasol to throw a shadow on the earth, and in the pale light of the shadow we put together a house.

Our cooking depends upon shadows and is inseparable from darkness

If I've changed, I've changed." "Have you really changed, or are you only making a show?" "Making a show?" "Yes." "...I don't really know.

If indeed "elegance is frigid," it can as well be described as filthy. There is no denying, at any rate, that among the elements of the elegance in which we take such delight is a measure of the unclean, the unsanitary.

There are those who hold that to quibble over matters of taste in the basic necessities of life is an extravagance

The parlor may have its charms, but the Japanese toilet truly is a place of spiritual repose. It always stands apart from the main building, at the end of a corridor, in a grove fragrant with leaves and moss. No words can describe that sensation as one sits in the dim light, basking in the faint glow reflected from the shoji, lost in meditation or gazing out at the garden.

Find beauty not only in the thing itself but in the pattern of the shadows, the light and dark which that thing provides.

We Orientals find beauty not only in the thing itself but in the pattern of the shadows, the light and darkness which that thing provides.