Quotes from Yukio Mishima

It is no exaggeration to say that the first real problem I faced in my life was that of beauty.

my grief at being eternally excluded…

And in this house it was tacitly required that I act like a boy. The reluctant masquerade had begun. At about this time I was beginning to understand vaguely the mechanism of the fact that what people regarded as a pose on my part was actually an expression of my need to assert my true nature, and that it was precisely what people regarded as my true self which was a masquerade.

Otaguro's bosom heaved with an ineffable surge of joy. "Every man is fighting," he murmured. "Every man.

Or was the moment teaching me how grotesque my isolation would appear to the eyes of love, and at the same time was I learning, from the reverse side of the lesson, my own incapacity for accepting love?...

So then, this image of a lukewarm man that Sonoko was now seeing, this thing that appeared to be my character, aroused my disgust, made my entire existence seem worthless, and tore my self-confidence into shreds. I was made to distrust both my will and my character, or at least, so far as my will was concerned, I could not believe it was anything but a fake.

I was like a person who has been suffering an unknown disease in an agony of fear: just learning the name of his disease, even though it is an incurable one, gives him a surprising feeling of temporary relief. He knows well, though, that the relief is only temporary. Moreover in his heart he foresees a still more inescapable hopelessness, which, by its very nature, will give a more permanent feeling of relief.

My reason for proposing the game also lay in my inverted sense of social duty: in short, I felt that I must not fawn upon the girls, but must somehow give them a hard time.

As I have remarked several times, the future was a heavy burden for me. From the very beginning, life had oppressed me with a heavy sense of duty. Even though I was clearly incapable of performing this duty, life still nagged at me for my dereliction. Thus I longed for the great sense of relief that death would surely bring if only, like a wrestler, I could wrench the heavy weight of life from my shoulders.

The Chief always insisted it would take acts such as this to fill the world's great hollows. Though nothing else could do it, he said, murder would fill those gaping caves in much the same way that a crack along its face will fill a mirror. Then they would achieve real power over existence.

And at the time it had not been the flames against which they fought, but against human relationships, against loves and hatreds, against reason, against property. At the time, like the crew of a wrecked ship, they had found themselves in a situation where it was permissible to kill one person in order that another might live.

I had a presentiment then that there is in this world a kind of desire like stinging pain. Looking up at that dirty youth, I was choked by desire, thinking, 'I want to change into him', thinking, 'I want to be him'.

Os fantasmas do mar, dos navios e das viagens oceânicas existiam apenas nessa gota verde brilhante. Mas, por cada dia que passava, mais os odores abomináveis da vida em terra se colavam ao marinheiro: o cheiro da família, o cheiro dos vizinhos, o cheiro da paz, do peixe frito, das piadas e das mobílias sempre imóveis, o cheiro dos livros de contas da casa e dos passeios de fim-de-semana... todos os cheiros pútridos que os homens de terra deitam, o fedor da morte.

I was one of those savage marauders who, not knowing how to express their love, mistakenly kill the person they love.

Is it a common failing of childhood to think that if one makes a hero out of a demon the demon will be satisfied.

Thus in a single phrase I can define the great illusion concerning 'love' in this world. It is the effort to join reality with the apparition. Presently I came to realize that my conviction—the conviction that I could never be loved-was itself the basic state of human existence

Someone once said that homosexuals have on their faces a certain loneliness that will not come off.

En el momento en que un león cautivo se escapa de la jaula, posee un mundo más amplio que el que sólo ha conocido la selva". Sed de amor

Devant ce que j'avais si longtemps attendu, devant ce que j'avais par avance trop embelli au cours de mes rêveries; il ne me restait finalement qu'un seul recours : la fuite.

Zašto mi je oprostila? Je li mogla postojati ve?a uvreda od takve velikodušnosti? Ah, možda bi, govorio sam si, moja bol mogla zacijeliti kad bi me ona barem još jednom jasno uvrijedila.

Tobožnja stidljivost i kreposnost oblici su sebi?nosti, tek obi?ni postupci samozaštite koji su potrebni upravo zbog žestine naših vlastitih želja.

And the trap into which the deformed person finally falls does not lie in his resolving the state of antagonism between himself and the world, but instead takes the form of his completely approving of this antagonism. That's why a deformed person can never really be cured.

Non mi curavo di nulla, e d'altronde nulla si curava di me.

Avevo imparato ad atteggiare le labbra al sorriso di chi la sa lunga sulle vicende del mondo, un sorriso simile a quello di un giovane sacerdote. Avevo il senso di non essere né vivo né morto.