Quote

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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Better to be caught in sudden, complete catastrophe than to be gnawed by the cancer of imagination.
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Nobody even imagines how well one can lie about the state of one’s own heart.
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There isn't any fear in existence itself, or any uncertainty, but living creates it.
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Glory, as anyone knows, is bitter stuff.
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The period of childhood is a stage on which time and space become entangled.
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Quite possibly, what I call happiness may coincide with what others call the moment of imminent danger
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Beauty is something that burns the hand when you touch it.
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If the photographer is to create works that will stand for his spirit in the same way as artists in other genres, he must first - having no ready-made, abstract components such as works and sounds - supply other means to abstraction instead.
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Living is merely the chaos of existence.
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As long as you know I am waiting, take your time flowers of the spring.
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For an artist to do creative work, he needs at once physical health and some physiomental ill health. He needs both serenity and gloom.
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Beyond doubt, there was a certain splendor in pain, which bore a deep affinity to the splendor that lies hidden within strength.
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I seemed like a baby bird keeping its truly innocent animal lusts hidden under its wing. I was being tempted, not by the desire of possession, but simply by unadorned temptation itself.
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It is a rather risky matter to discuss a happiness that has no need of words.
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There's a huge seal called 'impossibility' pasted all over this world. And don't ever forget that we're the only ones who can tear it off once and for all.
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I want to make a poem of my life.
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An ugliness unfurled in the moonlight and soft shadow and suffused the whole world. If I were an amoeba, he thought, with an infinitesimal body, I could defeat ugliness. A man isn’t tiny or giant enough to defeat anything.
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All my life I have been acutely aware of a contradiction in the very nature of my existence. For forty-five years I struggled to resolve this dilemma by writing plays and novels. The more I wrote, the more I realized mere words were not enough. So I found another form of expression.
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For clearly it is impossible to touch eternity with one hand and life with the other.
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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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