his sighs were sultry like the tidal breezes of full summer, fragrant with a smell of seaweed cast up upon the shore.

beauty is a perfect abstraction and creation of life itself.

seeing is the antithesis to existing.

when anger makes them reveal in a flash, human nature in all its horror.

we do not collide with our destiny all of a sudden.

but who turned them into such monsters? you samurai did! you did!

other people are all witnesses. if no other people exist, shame would not be born in the world.

was not such beauty as his a thing destined for death?

they rejected both life and death as I has seen them, for in both of these, the sun had a hand.

the special quality of hell is to see everything clearly down to the last detail.

in time this ambition became still stronger and, expanding within me, saw a strange development.

yet how strange a thing is the beauty of music! the brief beauty that the player brings into being transforms a given period of time into continuance; it is certain to never be repeated; like the existence of dayflies and other such short lived

I admitted to myself that I could never become an Omi and, upon further consideration, that my desire to become like Omi had in fact been love for Omi.

I admitted to myself that I could never become an Omi and, upon further consideration, that my desire to become like Omi had in fact been love for Omi.

the human body is the work of art, it doesn‘t need artists.

when you look at the world with knowledge, you realise that things are unchangeable and at the same time are constantly being transformed.

or rather: it was the books that looked at you, with the bewildered gaze of dogs, who from their cages in the city pound, see a former companion go off on the leash of his master, come to rescue him.

a raw carnal feeling blazed up within me, branding my cheeks. I felt myself staring at him with crystal — clear eyes.

but, it may well be asked, can a person be so completely false to his own nature? even for one moment? if the answer is no, then there is no way to explain the mysterious mental process by which we crave things we actually do not want at all, is

his muscular arms, the arms of a praetorian guard accustomed to bending of bow and wielding of sword, are raised at a graceful angle, and his bound wrists are crossed directly over his head.

to see human beings in agony, to see them covered in blood and to hear their death groans, makes people humble. it makes their spirits delicate, bright, peaceful. it’s never at such times that we become cruel or bloodthirsty. no, it’s on a beautiful

when one considers well, it seems likely that many a time, even in the midst of a sweet kiss, a foretaste of the agony of death must have furrowed his brow with a fleeting shadow of pain.

but there is no such thing as individual knowledge, a particular knowledge belonging to one special person or group. knowledge is the sea of humanity, the field of humanity, the general condition of human existence.

to put it in a rather vulgar way, I had been dreaming about love in the firm belief that I could not be loved, but at the final stage, I had substituted desire for love and felt a sort of relief. but in the end I had understood that desire itself

music giving such religious, tranquil pleasure that it could only be called sacred, filled with the solemnity and longing found in the patterns of stately wall tapestries.

when anger makes them reveal in a flash, human nature in all its horror.

I have not envied the bird its freedom, nor have I longed for the ease of nature.

in the pupils of his eyes there lingered the mysterious and eternal horizon that the sea leaves as a keepsake deep in the eyes of all who are born at the seaside and forced to depart from it.

it was suitable that he, whose life had been so incomparably pure a structure, should suffer the pure death of an accident. in that collision, that had lasted no more than a second, there had been a sudden contact and his life merged with death. a

suddenly there came into view from one corner of the next page a picture that I had to believe had been lying in wait there for me, for my sake.

" but I've made up my mind. " " you say that because you don't realize what it means. but then the day for volunteering has already passed. so there's nothing to do about it now. it's your destiny. “

" but I've made up my mind. " " you say that because you don't realize what it means. but then the day for volunteering has already passed. so there's nothing to do about it now. it's your destiny. “

for me, beauty is always retreating from one’s grasp; the only thing I consider important is what existed once, or ought to have existed.

the past does not draw us back to the past. there are certain memories of the past that have strong steel springs and, when we who live in the present touch them, they are suddenly stretched taut and then they propel us into the future.

I came to be able to sense whether an attack was likely to approach death or not.

how could anyone have expected such a person to have a secret, inner life? all one could hope to find in him was the pattern of that forgotten perfection which the rest of us have lost in some far distant past.

when people concentrate on the idea of beauty, they are, without realising it, confronted with the darkest thoughts that exist in this world. that, I suppose, is how human beings are made.

did the soft earth turn to steel only to show me my own softness?

I feigned an innocent optimism; I gradually perfected myself in the role of the farcical eccentric.

he was fully aware that beauty is a thing which must sleep and which, in sleeping, must be protected by knowledge.

at times the smile that accompanied her gentle way of speaking seemed almost pathetic.

but who turned them into such monsters? you samurai did! you did!

other people must be destroyed. in order that I might truly face the sun, the world itself must be destroyed.

I have not envied the bird its freedom, nor have I longed for the ease of nature.

it was this combination —— one part unconscious belief, one part unconscious despair —— that so quickened my desires that they appeared to be desperate ambitions.

I am one who has been interested only in the edges of the body and the spirit, the outlying regions of the body and the outlying regions of the spirit. the depths hold no interest for me; I leave them to others, for they are shallow, commonplace.

nothingness was the very structure of this beauty.

that principle, it occurred to me, was death.

my inherent deficiency of blood had first implanted in me the impulse to dream of bloodshed. And in its turn that impulse had caused me to lose more and more of the stuff of blood from my body, thereby further increasing my lust for blood.

music giving such religious, tranquil pleasure that it could only be called sacred, filled with the solemnity and longing found in the patterns of stately wall tapestries.