Quotes from Yukio Mishima

The special quality of hell is to see everything clearly down to the last detail.

Possessing by letting go of things was a secret of ownership unknown to youth.

living is merely the chaos of existence...

When silence is prolonged over a certain period of time, it takes on new meaning.

Time is what matters. As time goes by, you and I will be carried inexorably into the mainstream of our period, even though we're unaware of what it is. And later, when they say that young men in the early Taisho era thought, dressed, talked, in such and such a way, they'll be talking about you and me. We'll all be lumped together…. In a few decades, people will see you and the people you despise as one and the same, a single entity.

An ugliness unfurled in the moonlight and soft shadow and suffused the whole world. If I were an amoeba, he thought, with an infinitesimal body, I could defeat ugliness. A man isn't tiny or giant enough to defeat anything.

I still have no way to survive but to keep writing one line, one more line, one more line...

Yet how strange a thing is the beauty of music! The brief beauty that the player brings into being transforms a given period of time into pure continuance; it is certain never to be repeated; like the existence of dayflies and other such short-lived creatures, beauty is a perfect abstraction and creation of life itself. Nothing is so similar to life as music.

Anything can become excusable when seen from the standpoint of the result

of all the kinds of decay in this world, decadent purity is the most malignant.

The instant that the blade tore open his flesh, the bright disk of the sun soared up and exploded behind his eyelids.

We are not wounded so deeply when betrayed by the things we hope for as when betrayed by things we try our best to despise. In such betrayal comes the dagger in the back.

Was I ignorant, then, when I was seventeen? I think not. I knew everything. A quarter-century's experience of life since then has added nothing to what I knew. The one difference is that at seventeen I had no 'realism'.

The past does not only draw us back to the past. There are certain memories of the past that have strong steel springs and, when we who live in the present touch them, they are suddenly stretched taut and then they propel us into the future.

if the world changed, i could not exist, and if i changed, the world could not exist

a samurai is a total human being, whereas a man who is completely absorbed in his technical skill has degenerated into a 'function', one cog in a machine.

At no time are we ever in such complete possession of a journey, down to its last nook and cranny, as when we are busy with preparations for it.

I want to make a poem of my life.

Human life is limited but I would like to live forever.

The most appropriate type of daily life for me was a day-by-day world destruction; peace was the most difficult and abnormal state to live in.

If we value so highly the dignity of life, how can we not also value the dignity of death No death may be called futile.

For clearly it is impossible to touch eternity with one hand and life with the other.

The period of childhood is a stage on which time and space become entangled.

For a long time I had not approached the forbidden fruit called happiness, but it was now tempting me with a melancholy persistence. I felt as though Sonoko were an abyss above which I stood poised.