A hidden poetry that will be lost if any mediocrity is shed. Genius is a casualty. The poetry must never be conspicuous – its scent is only detectable when subtle.
They avoided talk of the old days, like a pair weaving in and out among puddles after a rainstorm, so deftly that neither of them found the process awkward.
Before long, my blood would not permit a halt of even a day or two. Something ceaselessly set me to work; my body could no longer tolerate indolence, but began instantly to thirst for violent action, forever urging me on. Thus for many a day I led a life that others might well dismiss as frenzied obsession.
I discovered how our hearts, as though infected with some malignant virus, were being eaten away by the uneasy awakening that was brazenly intruding upon our dream, by the futile pleasure of our dream seen at the threshold of consciousness.
The elements of intoxication and superhuman clarity in the tragic are born when the average sensibility, endowed with a given physical strength, encounters that type of privileged moment especially designed for it. Tragedy calls for an anti-tragic vitality and ignorance, and above all for a certain “inappropriateness.” If a person is at times to draw close to the divine, then under normal conditions he must be neither divine nor anything approaching it.
I believe that just as physical training will transform supposedly involuntary muscles into voluntary ones, so a similar transformation can be achieved through training the mind. Both body and mind, through an inevitable tendency that one might almost call a natural law, are inclined to lapse into automatism, but I have found by experience that a large stream may be deflected by digging a small channel.
He radiated the innocence that marks the absolute rejection of prudence.
A person who has been seriously wounded does not demand that the bandages that save his life be clean.
Bu dunyanin uzerine boydan boya yapistirilmis bir “olaniksizlik”etiketi vardir. Ve bu etiketi yirtip atabileceklerin sadece biz oldugunu aklindan cikarma.
I hope that I am making myself understood. The Golden Temple once more appeared before me. Or rather, I should say that the breast was transformed into the Golden Temple.
Besides, like a man who knows he is dying, he felt a need to be equally tender to all.
Noboru tried to compare the corpse confronting the world so nakedly with what might have seemed the unsurpassably naked figures of his mother and the sailor; by comparison, they weren’t naked enough. They were still swaddled in skin. Even that marvellous hom and the great wide world whose expanse it had limned couldn’t possibly have penetrated as deeply as this... the pumping of the bared heart placed the peeled kitten in direct and tingling contact with the kernel of the world.
There was for me nothing that might have been called the pinnacle of my youth, and so no moment for stopping it. One should stop at the pinnacle. I could discern none. Strangely, I feel no regrets.
That is because the most subtle and delicate wishes of evil are not for a physical wound but for a spiritual.
No one can know what a sacrifice it is for me to be gentle and docile.
I have been self-reliant to the point of sadness. I wonder when I first fell into the habit of washing my hands after each brush with humanity, lest I be contaminated.
If the cause of decay was illness, then the fundamental cause of that, the flesh, was illness too. The essence of the flesh was decay. It had its spot in time to give evidence of destruction and decay.
Surely, I thought, we do not deserve even a little happiness. Or perhaps we had acquired the bad habit of regarding even a little happiness as a big favor, which we would have to repay.
My conscience was pricked by the happiness of being loved. Or perhaps I was craving some still more decisive unhappiness.
To be half-clever was the worst I could have done.