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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

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Yasunari Kawabata
Age: 72 †
Born: 1899
Born: June 11
Died: 1972
Died: April 16
Novelist
Poet
Screenwriter
Writer
Ōsaka
Blue
Skirts
Moon
Blades
Kimono
Quiet
Frozen
Kimonos
Cold
Ice
Hitched
Like
Village
Tucked
Lays
Shone
Sky
Skirt
Road
Blade

More quotes by Yasunari Kawabata

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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
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A secret, if it's kept, can be sweet and comforting, but once it leaks out it can turn on you with a vengeance.
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They were words that came out of nothing, but they seemed to him somehow significant. He muttered them over again.
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But a haiku by Buson came into his mind: 'I try to forget this senile love a chilly autumn shower.' The gloom only grew denser.
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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.
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The winter moon becomes a companion, the heart of the priest, sunk in meditation upon religion and philosophy, there in the mountain hall, is engaged in a delicate interplay and exchange with the moon and it is this of which the poet sings.
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Lunatics have no age. If we were crazy, you and I, we might be a great deal younger.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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THE TRAIN came out of the long tunnel into the snow country.
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Along the coast the sea roars, and inland the mountains roar – the roaring at the center, like a distant clap of thunder.
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Our language is primarily for expressing human goodness and beauty.
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I suppose even a woman's hatred is a kind of love.
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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.
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The labor into which a heart has poured its whole love--where will it have its say, to excite and inspire, and when?
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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.
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From the way of Go the beauty of Japan and the Orient had fled. Everything had become science and regulation.
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Put your soul in the palm of my hand for me to look at, like a crystal jewel. I'll sketch it in words.
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