Quotes from Yasunari Kawabata

A secret, if it's kept, can be sweet and comforting, but once it leaks out it can turn on you with a vengeance.

The baby understands that its mother loves it. [...] Words have their origin in baby talk, so words have their origin in love.

A child walked by, rolling a metal hoop that made a sound of autumn.

From the way of Go the beauty of Japan and the Orient had fled. Everything had become science and regulation.

Cosmic time is the same for everyone, but human time differs with each person. Time flows in the same way for all human beings; every human being flows through time in a different way.

The labor into which a heart has poured its whole love--where will it have its say, to excite and inspire, and when?

People have separated from each other with walls of concrete that blocked the roads to connection and love. and Nature has been defeated in the name of development.

I suppose even a woman's hatred is a kind of love.

But a haiku by Buson came into his mind: 'I try to forget this senile love; a chilly autumn shower.' The gloom only grew denser.

The true joy of a moonlit night is something we no longer understand. Only the men of old, when there were no lights, could understand the true joy of a moonlit night.

And I can't complain. After all, only women are able really to love.

Lunatics have no age. If we were crazy, you and I, we might be a great deal younger.

Our language is primarily for expressing human goodness and beauty.

I wonder what the retirement age is in the novel business. The day you die.

Yet the misty spring rain softened the outline of the mountain across the river and made it even more beautiful. So gentle was the rain that they hardly knew they were getting wet as they strolled back toward the car, not even bothering to put up their umbrella. The slender threads of rain vanished into the river without a ripple. Cherry blossoms were intermingled with young green leaves, the colours of the budding trees all delicately subdued in the rain.

Her manner was as though she were talking of a distant foreign literature. There was something lonely, something sad in it, something that rather suggested a beggar who has lost all desire.

And the Milky Way, like a great aurora, flowed through his body to stand at the edges of the earth. There was a quiet, chilly loneliness in it, and a sort of voluptuous astonishment.

But, drawn to her at that moment, he felt a quiet like the voice of the rain flow over him. He knew well enough that for her it was in fact no waste of effort, but somehow the final determination that it was had the effect of distilling and purifying the woman's existence.

Again she lost herself in the talk, and again her words seemed to be warming her whole body.

he heard a sound that only a magnificent old bell could produce, a sound that seemed to roar forth with all the latent power of a distant world.

This is no world for gentle people

He was conscious of an emptiness that made him see Komako's life as beautiful but wasted, even though he himself was the object of her love; and yet the woman's existence, her straining to live, came touching him like naked skin. He pitied her, and he pitied himself.

Her awareness of her body was inseparable from her memory of his embrace.

In a gourd that had been handed down for three centuries, a flower that would fade in a morning.