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Better to be caught in sudden, complete catastrophe than to be gnawed by the cancer of imagination.

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
Complete
Caught
Imagination
Better
Gnawed
Catastrophe
Sudden
Cancer

More quotes by Yukio Mishima

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It is a rather risky matter to discuss a happiness that has no need of words.
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Anything can become excusable when seen from the standpoint of the result
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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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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.
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When people concentrate on the idea of beauty, they are, without realizing it, confronted with the darkest thoughts that exist in this world. That, I suppose, is how human beings are made.
Yukio Mishima
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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.
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There is no virtue in curiosity. In fact, it might be the most immoral desire a man can possess.
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The mind, by its very nature, persistently tries to live forever, resisting age and attempting to give itself a form... . When a person passes his prime and his life begins to lose true vigor and charm, his mind starts functioning as if it were another form of life it imitates what life does, eventually doing what life cannot do.
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The most appropriate type of daily life for me was a day-by-day world destruction peace was the most difficult and abnormal state to live in.
Yukio Mishima
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As long as you know I am waiting, take your time flowers of the spring.
Yukio Mishima
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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.
Yukio Mishima
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There isn't any fear in existence itself, or any uncertainty, but living creates it.
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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Young people get the foolish idea that what is new for them must be new for everybody else too. No matter how unconventional they get, they're just repeating what others before them have done.
Yukio Mishima
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Living is merely the chaos of existence.
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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The instant that the blade tore open his flesh, the bright disk of the sun soared up and exploded behind his eyelids.
Yukio Mishima
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Human beings - they go on being born and dying, dying and being born. It's kind of boring, isn't it?
Yukio Mishima
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The period of childhood is a stage on which time and space become entangled.
Yukio Mishima
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I had no taste for defeat - much less victory - without a fight.
Yukio Mishima