Along the coast the sea roars, and inland the mountains roar – the roaring at the center, like a distant clap of thunder.
THE TRAIN came out of the long tunnel into the snow country.
Time flows in the same way for all human beings; every human being flows through time in a different way.
In the depths of the mirror the evening landscape moved by, the mirror and the reflected figures like motion pictures superimposed one on the other. The figures and the background were unrelated, and yet the figures, transparent and intangible, and the background, dim in the gathering darkness, melted into a sort of symbolic world not of this world. Particularly when a light out in the mountains shone in the centre of the girl’s face, Shimamura felt his chest rise at the inexpressible beauty of it.
This is no world for gentle people.
The woman was silent, her eyes on the floor. Shimamura had come to a point where he knew he was only parading his masculine shamelessness, and yet it seemed likely enough that the woman was familiar with the failing and need not be shocked by it. He looked at her. Perhaps it was the rich lashes of the downcast eyes that made her face seem warm and sensuous. She shook her head very slightly, and again a faint blush spread over her face.
He had thought on the train of sending his head to a laundry, it was true, but he had been drawn not so much to the idea of the laundered head as to that of the sleeping body. A very pleasant sleep, with head detached.
In a gourd that had been handed down for three centuries, a flower that would fade in a morning.
Your mother was such a gentle person. I always feel when I see someone like her that I’m watching the last flowers fall. This is no world for gentle people.
Nothing could be more comfortable than writing about the ballet from books. A ballet he had never seen was an art in another world. It was an unrivaled armchair reverie, a lyric from some paradise. He called his work research, but it was actually free, uncontrolled fantasy. He preferred not to savor the ballet in the flesh; rather he savored the phantasms of his own dancing imagination, called up by Western books and pictures. It was like being in love with someone he had never seen.
Supongo que en una mujer, hasta el odio es una forma del amor.
Stop. I don’t like it. I don’t like having people die.
The high, thin nose was a little lonely, a little sad, but the bud of her lips opened and closed smoothly, like a beautiful little circle of leeches.
I could not bear the silences when the drum stopped. I sank down into the depths of the sound of the rain.
He could not call up the faces of his own mother and father, who had died three or four years before. He would look at a picture, and there they would be. Perhaps people were progressively harder to paint in the mind as they near one, loved by one. Perhaps clear memories came easily in proportion as they were ugly.
Do you think it’s right to not say goodbye to the man you yourself said was on the very first page of your very first volume of your diary? This is the very last page of his.
El tiempo corre de la misma manera para todos los seres humanos; pero todo ser humano flota de distinta manera en el tiempo.
The notes went out crystalline into the clean winter morning, to sound on the far, snowy peaks.
He closed his eyes and the warmth sank into his head, bringing an immediate sense of life. Reality came through the violent breathing, and with a sort of nostalgic remorse. He felt as though he was waiting tranquilly for some undefined revenge.
Even when natural weather is good, human weather is bad.