{"author":"Yukio Mishima","author_id":"Yukio+Mishima","total_quotes":58,"quotes":[{"text":"When I arrived at the house in the suburbs that night I seriously contemplated suicide for the first time in my life. But as I thought about it, the idea became exceedingly tiresome, and I finally decided it would be a ludicrous business. I had an inherent dislike of admitting defeat. Moreover, I told myself, there's no need for me to take such decisive action myself, not when I'm surrounded by such a bountiful harvest of death—death in an air raid, death at one's post of duty, death in the military service, death on the battlefield, death from being run over, death from disease—surely my name has already been entered in the list for one of these: a criminal who has been sentenced to death does not commit suicide. No—no matter how I considered, the season was not auspicious for suicide. Instead I was waiting for something to do me the favor of killing me. And this, in the final analysis, is the same as to say that I was waiting for something to do me the favor of keeping me alive.","author":"Yukio Mishima","tags":["death","suicide"],"id":6795,"author_id":"Yukio+Mishima"},{"text":"The instant that the blade tore open his flesh, the bright disk of the sun soared up and exploded behind his eyelids.","author":"Yukio Mishima","tags":["suicide"],"id":8331,"author_id":"Yukio+Mishima"},{"text":"To put it in a rather vulgar way, I had been dreaming about love in the firm belief that I could not be loved, but at the final stage I had substituted desire for love and felt a sort of relief. But in the end I had understood that desire itself demanded for its fulfillment that I should forget about the conditions of my existence, and that I should abandon what for me constituted the only barrier to love, namely the belief that I could not be loved. I had always thought of desire as being something clearer than it really is, and I had not realized that it required people to see themselves in a slightly dreamlike, unreal way.","author":"Yukio Mishima","tags":["desire","love"],"id":18246,"author_id":"Yukio+Mishima"},{"text":"When one has attained a state of mind from which the evil passions of the present world have been so utterly winnowed, fear too is forgotten. Thus it was that the priest no longer could understand why Hell should exist.","author":"Yukio Mishima","tags":["enlightenment"],"id":21375,"author_id":"Yukio+Mishima"},{"text":"Count Ayakura’s abstraction persisted. He believed that only a vulgar mentality was willing to acknowledge the possibility of catastrophe. He felt that taking naps was much more beneficial than confronting catastrophes. However precipitous the future might seem, he learned from the game of kemari that the ball must always come down. There was no call for consternation. Grief and rage, along with other outbursts of passion, were mistakes easily committed by a mind lacking in refinement. And the Count was certainly not a man who lacked refinement.Just let matters slide. How much better to accept each sweet drop of the honey that was Time, than to stoop to the vulgarity latent in every decision. However grave the matter at hand might be, if one neglected it for long enough, the act of neglect itself would begin to affect the situation, and someone else would emerge as an ally. Such was Count Ayakura’s version of political theory.","author":"Yukio Mishima","tags":["acceptance","elegance","inaction","indifference","japan","passivity","refinement"],"id":32920,"author_id":"Yukio+Mishima"},{"text":"The only people in this world I really trust are my fans - even if they do forget you so fast.","author":"Yukio Mishima","tags":["fans","trust"],"id":33547,"author_id":"Yukio+Mishima"},{"text":"Kazu, now that she thought of it, realized that for all her headstrong temperament, she had never loved a man younger than herself. A young man has such a surplus of spiritual and physical gifts that he is likely to be cocksure of himself, particularly when dealing with an older woman, and there is no telling how swelled up with self-importance he may become. Besides, Kazu felt a physical repugnance for youth. A woman is more keenly aware than a man of the shocking disharmony between a young man's spiritual and physical qualities, and Kazu had never met a young man who wore his youth well. She was moreover repelled by the sleekness of a young man's skin.","author":"Yukio Mishima","tags":["age","youth"],"id":33803,"author_id":"Yukio+Mishima"},{"text":"So far as feelings were concerned, there was no discrepancy between the very finest feeling in this world and the very worst; that their effect was the same; that no visible difference existed between murderous intent and feelings of deep compassion.","author":"Yukio Mishima","tags":["feelings"],"id":38151,"author_id":"Yukio+Mishima"},{"text":"Thus in a single phrase I can define the great illusion concerning 'love' in this world. It is the effort to join reality with the apparition.","author":"Yukio Mishima","tags":["love","reality","translated"],"id":61502,"author_id":"Yukio+Mishima"},{"text":"True beauty is something that attacks, overpowers, robs, and finally destroys.","author":"Yukio Mishima","tags":["beauty","cruelty","love"],"id":64328,"author_id":"Yukio+Mishima"}],"pagination":{"page":1,"page_size":10,"total":58,"pages":6,"next":"?page=2\u0026page_size=10"}}