In a gourd that had been handed down for three centuries, a flower that would fade in a morning.
Love is my only lifeline.
Father’s life was only a very small part of the life of a tea bowl.
For such a tiny death, the empty eight-mat room seemed enormous.
Women are odd,” he said, to extricate himself. “Two or three of them have told me they’re sure I modeled one of my characters on them. And they were complete strangers, women I’d had nothing to do with. What kind of delusion could that be?” “Lots of women are unhappy, so they console themselves with delusions.
The sound of the freezing of snow over the land seemed to roar deep into the earth. There was no moon. The stars, almost too many of them to be true, came forward so brightly that it was as if they were falling with the swiftness of the void.
In the moonlight the fine geishalike skin took on the luster of a seashell.
A voice so beautiful it was almost lonely, calling out as if to someone who could not hear, on ship far away.
I like the idea of saying thank you on behalf of the weather.
A feeling of nagging, hopeless impotence came over Shimamura at the thought that a simple misunderstanding had worked its way so deep into the woman’s being.
Your ears are lovely, he said, but there’s a kind of eerie beauty to your profile.
La conciencia de su propio cuerpo era inseparable del recuerdo de aquel abrazo.
Two middle-aged American couples came back from the dining car and, as soon as they could see Mt. Fuji, past Numazu, stood at the windows eagerly taking photographs. By the time Fuji was completely visible, down to the fields at its base, they seemed tired of photographing and had turned their backs to it. The.
But this love would leave behind it nothing so definite as a piece of Chijimi. Though cloth to be worn is among the most short-lived of craftworks, a good piece of Chijimi, if it has been taken care of, can be worn quite unfaded a half-century and more after weaving. As Shimamura thought absently how human intimacies have not even so long a life, the image of Komako as the mother of another man’s children suddenly floated into his mind. He looked around, startled. Possibly he was tired.
Any kind of inhumanity, given practice, becomes human. All the varieties of transgression are buried in the darkness of the world.
When you’re held by the dead, you begin to feel that you aren’t in this world yourself.
As it became clear to Shimamura that he had from the start wanted only this woman, and that he had taken his usual roundabout way of saying so, he began to see himself as rather repulsive and the woman as all the more beautiful.
But love flowed into the apology, to coddle and mollify the guilt.
It was, with no attempt at covering itself, the naked heart of a woman calling out to her man.
Haiku are tiny seventeen-syllable poems that seek to convey a sudden awareness of beauty by a mating of opposite or incongruous terms.
I gave myself up to my tears. It was as though my head had turned to clear water, it was falling pleasantly away drop by drop; soon nothing would remain.