Yasunari Kawabata was a Japanese novelist and short-story writer whose spare, lyrical, subtly-shaded prose works won him the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1968, the first Japanese author to receive the award. These motivational Yasunari Kawabata Quotes will inspire your life.
Best Yasunari Kawabata Quotes
- “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
- “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
- “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
- “The labor into which a heart has poured its whole love–where will it have its say, to excite and inspire, and when?” – Yasunari Kawabata
- “The road was frozen. The village lay quiet under the cold sky. Komako hitched up the skirt of her kimono and tucked it into her obi. The moon shone like a blade frozen in blue ice.” – Yasunari Kawabata
- “Seeing the moon, he becomes the moon, the moon seen by him becomes him. He sinks into nature, becomes one with nature. The light of the “clear heart” of the priest, seated in the meditation hall in the darkness before the dawn, becomes for the dawn moon its own light.” – Yasunari Kawabata
- “Our language is primarily for expressing human goodness and beauty.” – Yasunari Kawabata
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“Because you cannot see him, God is everywhere.” – Yasunari Kawabata
- “Lunatics have no age. If we were crazy, you and I, we might be a great deal younger.” – Yasunari Kawabata
- “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
- “I suppose even a woman’s hatred is a kind of love.” – Yasunari Kawabata
- “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
- “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
- “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
- “Does pain go away and leave no trace, then?’ ‘You sometimes even feel sentimental for it.” – Yasunari Kawabata
- “The snow on the distant mountains was soft and creamy, as if veiled in a faint smoke.” – Yasunari Kawabata
- “A child walked by, rolling a metal hoop that made a sound of autumn.” – Yasunari Kawabata
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“I wonder what the retirement age is in the novel business. The day you die.” – Yasunari Kawabata
- “Maybe vagueness has been good for me. The word means two different things in Tokyo and Osaka, you know. In Tokyo it means stupidity, but in Osaka they talk about vagueness in a painting and in a game of Go.” – Yasunari Kawabata
- “And I can’t complain. After all, only women are able really to love.” – Yasunari Kawabata
- “From the way of Go the beauty of Japan and the Orient had fled. Everything had become science and regulation.” – Yasunari Kawabata
- “They were words that came out of nothing, but they seemed to him somehow significant. He muttered them over again.” – Yasunari Kawabata
- “THE TRAIN came out of the long tunnel into the snow country.” – Yasunari Kawabata
- “Along the coast the sea roars, and inland the mountains roar – the roaring at the center, like a distant clap of thunder.” – Yasunari Kawabata
- “A poetess who had died young of cancer had said in one of her poems that for her, on sleepless nights, ‘the night offers toads and black dogs and corpses of the drowned.” – Yasunari Kawabata
