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At no time are we ever in such complete possession of a journey, down to its last nook and cranny, as when we are busy with preparations for it. After that, there remains only the journey itself, which is nothing but the process through which we lose our ownership of it.

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
Time
Lose
Preparation
Loses
Insight
Lasts
Possession
Last
Complete
Process
Busy
Cranny
Action
Remains
Nook
Ever
Discipline
Preparations
Nothing
Journey
Ownership

More quotes by Yukio Mishima

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A man isn't tiny or giant enough to defeat anything.
Yukio Mishima
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If we value so highly the dignity of life, how can we not also value the dignity of death No death may be called futile.
Yukio Mishima
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Is there not a sort of remorse that precedes sin? Was it remorse at the very fact that I existed?
Yukio Mishima
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Anything can become excusable when seen from the standpoint of the result
Yukio Mishima
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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.
Yukio Mishima
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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.
Yukio Mishima
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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.
Yukio Mishima
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Men had been living a proud life, having felt no need for the spirit-until Christianity invented it.
Yukio Mishima
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The special quality of hell is to see everything clearly down to the last detail.
Yukio Mishima
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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.
Yukio Mishima
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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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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.
Yukio Mishima
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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.
Yukio Mishima
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If we look on idly, heaven and earth will never be joined. To join heaven and earth, some decisive deed of purity is necessary. To accomplish so resolute an action, you have to stake your life, giving no thought to personal gain or loss.
Yukio Mishima
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I had no taste for defeat - much less victory - without a fight.
Yukio Mishima
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There is no virtue in curiosity. In fact, it might be the most immoral desire a man can possess.
Yukio Mishima
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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.
Yukio Mishima
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Other people must be destroyed. In order that I might truly face the sun, the world itself must be destroyed.
Yukio Mishima
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...of all the kinds of decay in this world, decadent purity is the most malignant.
Yukio Mishima
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Better to be caught in sudden, complete catastrophe than to be gnawed by the cancer of imagination.
Yukio Mishima