True beauty is something that attacks, overpowers, robs, and finally destroys.
Perfect purity is possible if you turn your life into a line of poetry written with a splash of blood.
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’.
There’s no doubt that he’s heading straight for tragedy. It will be beautiful, of course, but should he throw his whole life away as a sacrificial offering to such a fleeting beauty – like a bird in flight glimpsed from a window?
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.
Young people get the foolish idea that what is new for them must be new for everybody else too. No matter how unconventional they get, they’re just repeating what others before them have done.
Beauty is something that burns the hand when you touch it.
Anything can become excusable when seen from the standpoint of the result.
Nobody even imagines how well one can lie about the state of one’s own heart.
The highest point at which human life and art meet is in the ordinary. To look down on the ordinary is to despise what you can’t have. Show me a man who fears being ordinary, and I’ll show you a man who is not yet a man.
A man isn’t tiny or giant enough to defeat anything.
Again and again, the cicada’s untiring cry pierced the sultry summer air like a needle at work on thick cotton cloth.
The instant that the blade tore open his flesh, the bright disk of the sun soared up and exploded behind his eyelids.
There isn’t any fear in existence itself, or any uncertainty, but living creates it.
For an artist to do creative work, he needs at once physical health and some physiomental ill health. He needs both serenity and gloom.
Human beings – they go on being born and dying, dying and being born. It’s kind of boring, isn’t it?
Better to be caught in sudden, complete catastrophe than to be gnawed by the cancer of imagination.
Quite possibly, what I call happiness may coincide with what others call the moment of imminent danger.