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I had no taste for defeat - much less victory - without a fight.
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
Without
Much
Defeat
Victory
Taste
Fight
Fighting
Less
More quotes by Yukio Mishima
Let us remember that the central reality must be sought in the writer's work: it is what the writer chose to write, or was compelled to write, that finally matters. And certainly Mishima's carefully premeditated death is part of his work.
Yukio Mishima
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
The period of childhood is a stage on which time and space become entangled.
Yukio Mishima
Beyond doubt, there was a certain splendor in pain, which bore a deep affinity to the splendor that lies hidden within strength.
Yukio Mishima
We live in an age in which there is no heroic death.
Yukio Mishima
Actually the action called a kiss represented nothing more for me than some place where my spirit could seek shelter.
Yukio Mishima
He had never looked forward to the wisdom and other vaunted benefits of old age. Would he be able to die young—and if possible free of all pain? A graceful death—as a richly patterned kimono, thrown carelessly across a polished table, slides unobtrusively down into the darkness of the floor beneath. A death marked by elegance.
Yukio Mishima
The cynicism that regards hero worship as comical is always shadowed by a sense of physical inferiority
Yukio Mishima
The images which the [press] photographer has filtered from reality, whether particular events or the anguish of human reactions to them, already bear a stamp of authenticity which the photographer is powerless to alter by one jot or tittle the meaning of the objects, by a process of purification, itself becomes the theme of the work.
Yukio Mishima
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.
Yukio Mishima
Anything can become excusable when seen from the standpoint of the result
Yukio Mishima
It seems to me that before the photograph can exist as art it must, by its very nature choose whether it is to be a record or a testimony.
Yukio Mishima
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
Better to be caught in sudden, complete catastrophe than to be gnawed by the cancer of imagination.
Yukio Mishima
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
Nobody even imagines how well one can lie about the state of one’s own heart.
Yukio Mishima
Pain, I came to feel, might well prove to be the sole proof of the persistence of consciousness within the flesh, the sole physical expression of consciousness. As my body acquired muscle, and in turn strength, there was gradually born within me a tendency towards the positive acceptance of pain, and my interest in physical suffering deepened.
Yukio Mishima
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
Human beings - they go on being born and dying, dying and being born. It's kind of boring, isn't it?
Yukio Mishima
Is there not a sort of remorse that precedes sin? Was it remorse at the very fact that I existed?
Yukio Mishima
