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Quote by Yukio Mishima

“To say human life had no meaning was the easy part. But Hanio was struck all over again by the huge amount of energy required to live a life filled with so much meaninglessness.”

Quote by Yukio Mishima

Work

Life for Sale

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Author

Yukio Mishima
Yukio Mishima

Yukio Mishima was a Japanese author and playwright, a prominent figure in post-war Japanese literature. His works, characterized by a fusion of traditional Japanese aesthetics and modernist techniques, often explored themes of tradition, ritual, and the samurai code. more

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“He came into my life in February 1932 and never left it again. More than a quarter of a century has passed since then, more than nine thousand days, desultory and tedious, hollow with the sense of effort or work without hope- days and years, many of them as dead as dry leaves on a dead tree. I can remember the day and the hour when I first set eyes on this boy who was to be the source of my greatest happiness and of my greatest despair.”

“I was often tempted, when all was at peace around me, and I the only unquiet thing that wandered so restless in a scene so beautiful and heavenly, if I except some bat, or frogs, whose harsh and interrupted croaking was heard only when I approached the shore - often, I say, was tempted to plunge into the silent lake, that the waters might close over me and my calamities forever.”

“When a despot ineptly sought to turn a country to a totalitarian nightmare, where was poetry? It wasn't sleeping. It kept the poets up at night. We wrote against despair toward beauty, toward a truth that could imprison us for making liars out of the fools deposited in the seats of power, kept there by puppets who kneeled in piles of promissory notes.”

“My dear Victor, do not speak thus. Heavy misfortunes have befallen us; but let us only cling closer to what remains, and transfer our love for those whom we have lost to those who yet live. Our circle will be small, but bound close by the ties of affection and mutual misfortune. And when time shall have softened your despair, new and dear objects of care will be born to replace those of whom we have been so cruelly deprived.”