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Was I ignorant, then, when I was seventeen? I think not. I knew everything. A quarter-century's experience of life since then has added nothing to what I knew. The one difference is that at seventeen I had no 'realism'.

Yukio Mishima

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Yukio Mishima
Age: 45 †
Born: 1925
Born: January 14
Died: 1970
Died: November 25
Actor
Author
Critic
Essayist
Film Actor
Film Director
Lyricist
Military Personnel
Model
Novelist
Playwright
Poet
Prosaist
Screenwriter
City of Tokyo
Mishima Yukio
Kimitake Hiraoka
Hiraoka Kimitake
Life
Differences
Seventeen
Knew
Quarter
Since
Realism
Experience
Added
Everything
Quarters
Nothing
Ignorant
Think
Difference
Thinking
Century

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We live in an age in which there is no heroic death.
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..and certain that life consisted of a few simple signals and decisions that death took root at the moment of birth and man’s only recourse thereafter was to water and tend it that propagation was a fiction consequently, society was a fiction too that fathers and teachers, by virtue of being fathers and teachers, were guilty of a grievous sin.
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Within those confining walls, teachers - a bunch of men all armed with the same information - gave the same lectures every year from the same notebooks and every year at the same point in the textbooks made the same jokes.
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It is a rather risky matter to discuss a happiness that has no need of words.
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The only people in this world I really trust are my fans - even if they do forget you so fast.
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Actually the action called a kiss represented nothing more for me than some place where my spirit could seek shelter.
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A man isn't tiny or giant enough to defeat anything.
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a samurai is a total human being, whereas a man who is completely absorbed in his technical skill has degenerated into a ‘function’, one cog in a machine.
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Men had been living a proud life, having felt no need for the spirit-until Christianity invented it.
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I still have no way to survive but to keep writing one line, one more line, one more line.
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if the world changed, i could not exist, and if i changed, the world could not exist
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The highest point at which human life and art meet is in the ordinary. To look down on the ordinary is to despise what you can't have. Show me a man who fears being ordinary, and I'll show you a man who is not yet a man.
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Suddenly the full long wail of a ship's horn surged through the open window and flooded the dim room—a cry of boundless, dark, demanding grief pitch-black and glabrous as a whale's back and burdened with all the passions of the tides, the memory of voyages beyond counting, the joys, the humiliations: the sea was screaming.
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The special quality of hell is to see everything clearly down to the last detail.
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According to Eshin's Essentials of Salvation, the Ten Pleasures are but a drop in the ocean when compared to the joys of the Pure Land.
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The past does not only 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.
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I want to make a poem of my life.
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Other people must be destroyed. In order that I might truly face the sun, the world itself must be destroyed.
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Beauty is something that burns the hand when you touch it.
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