1. “It’s remarkable how we go on year after year, doing the same old things. We get tired and bored, and ask when they’ll come for us” – Yasunari Kawabata
2. “This is no world for gentle people.” – Yasunari Kawabata
3. “Along the coast the sea roars, and inland the mountains roar – the roaring at the center, like a distant clap of thunder.” – Yasunari Kawabata
4. “When you’re held by the dead, you begin to feel that you aren’t in this world yourself.” – Yasunari Kawabata
5. “Your ears are lovely, he said, but there’s a kind of eerie beauty to your profile.” – Yasunari Kawabata
6. “Perhaps they don’t realize where they were, so they went on living.” – Yasunari Kawabata
7. “People have separated from each other with walls of concrete that blocked the roads to connection and love. and Nature has been defeated in the name of development.” – Yasunari Kawabata
8. “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.” – Yasunari Kawabata
9. “Because you cannot see him, God is everywhere.” – Yasunari Kawabata
10. “A voice so beautiful it was almost lonely, calling out as if to someone who could not hear, on ship far away.” – Yasunari Kawabata
11. “THE TRAIN came out of the long tunnel into the snow country.” – Yasunari Kawabata
12. “The snow on the distant mountains was soft and creamy, as if veiled in a faint smoke.” – Yasunari Kawabata
13. “Our language is primarily for expressing human goodness and beauty.” – Yasunari Kawabata
14. “Now, even more than the evening before, he could think of no one with whom to compare her. She had become absolute, beyond comparison. She had become decision and fate.” – Yasunari Kawabata
15. “I suppose even a woman’s hatred is a kind of love.” – Yasunari Kawabata
16. “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.” – Yasunari Kawabata
17. “After all, only women are able really to love.” – Yasunari Kawabata
18. “Even when natural weather is good, human weather is bad.” – Yasunari Kawabata
19. “Cosmic time is the same for everyone, but human time differs with each person. Time flows in the same way for all human beings; every human being flows through time in a different way.” – Yasunari Kawabata
20. “Put your soul in the palm of my hand for me to look at, like a crystal jewel. I’ll sketch it in words.” – Yasunari Kawabata
21. “A child walked by, rolling a metal hoop that made a sound of autumn.” – Yasunari Kawabata
22. “I could not bear the silences when the drum stopped. I sank down into the depths of the sound of the rain.” – Yasunari Kawabata
23. “Stop. I don’t like it. I don’t like having people die.” – Yasunari Kawabata
24. “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.” – Yasunari Kawabata
25. “The rich eyelashes again made him think that her eyes were half open.” – Yasunari Kawabata
26. “Father’s life was only a very small part of the life of a tea bowl.” – Yasunari Kawabata
27. “They were words that came out of nothing, but they seemed to him somehow significant. He muttered them over again.” – Yasunari Kawabata
28. “But love flowed into the apology, to coddle and mollify the guilt.” – Yasunari Kawabata
29. “But, drawn to her at that moment, he felt a quiet like the voice of the rain flow over him. He knew well enough that for her it was in fact no waste of effort, but somehow the final determination that it was had the effect of distilling and purifying the woman’s existence.” – Yasunari Kawabata
30. “Lunatics have no age. If we were crazy, you and I, we might be a great deal younger.” – Yasunari Kawabata
31. “Any kind of inhumanity, given practice, becomes human. All the varieties of transgression are buried in the darkness of the world.” – Yasunari Kawabata
32. “I think it’s Enough if the dead person can be forgiven.” – Yasunari Kawabata
33. “Anyway, it’s hardly a problem worth worrying about.” – Yasunari Kawabata
34. “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.” – Yasunari Kawabata
35. “Time flows in the same way for all human beings; every human being flows through time in a different way.” – Yasunari Kawabata
36. “The true joy of a moonlit night is something we no longer understand. Only the men of old, when there were no lights, could understand the true joy of a moonlit night.” – Yasunari Kawabata
37. “I wonder what the retirement age is in the novel business. The day you die.” – Yasunari Kawabata
38. “As he caught his footing, his head fell back, and the Milky Way flowed down inside him with a roar.” – Yasunari Kawabata
39. “A secret, if it’s kept, can be sweet and comforting, but once it leaks out it can turn on you with a vengeance.” – Yasunari Kawabata
40. “I like the idea of saying thank you on behalf of the weather.” – Yasunari Kawabata
41. “Even if you took it as cascading snowy mountains,it was not a cool snow-white. The cold of the snow and it’s warm colour made a kind of music.” – Yasunari Kawabata
42. “For such a tiny death, the empty eight-mat room seemed enormous.” – Yasunari Kawabata
43. “Does pain go away and leave no trace, then?’ ‘You sometimes even feel sentimental for it.” – Yasunari Kawabata
44. “From the way of Go the beauty of Japan and the Orient had fled. Everything had become science and regulation.” – Yasunari Kawabata
45. “I suppose even a woman’s hatred is a kind of love.” – Yasunari Kawabata