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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
Catastrophe
Sudden
Cancer
Complete
Caught
Imagination
Better
Gnawed

More quotes by Yukio Mishima

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...of all the kinds of decay in this world, decadent purity is the most malignant.
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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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Mine was the unbearable jealousy a cultured pearl must feel toward a genuine one. Or can there be such a thing in this world as a man who is jealous of the woman who loves him, precisely because of her love?
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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.
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It is a common failing of childhood to think that if one makes a hero out of a demon the demon will be satisfied.
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When silence is prolonged over a certain period of time, it takes on new meaning.
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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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Perfect purity is possible if you turn your life into a line of poetry written with a splash of blood.
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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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We are not wounded so deeply when betrayed by the things we hope for as when betrayed by things we try our best to despise. In such betrayal comes the dagger in the back.
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We live in an age in which there is no heroic death.
Yukio Mishima
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For clearly it is impossible to touch eternity with one hand and life with the other.
Yukio Mishima
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I want to make a poem of my life.
Yukio Mishima
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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.
Yukio Mishima
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Beauty is something that burns the hand when you touch it.
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.
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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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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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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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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