Anything can become excusable when seen from the standpoint of the result

The special quality of hell is to see everything clearly down to the last detail.

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.

He was in a room of the Gesshuuji, which he had thought it would be impossible to visit. The approach of death had made the visit easy, had unloosed the weight that held him in the depths of being. It was even a comfort to think, from the light repose the struggle up the hill had brought him, that Kiyoaki, struggling against illness up that same road, had been given wings to soar with by the denial that awaited him.

Nobody even imagines how well one can lie about the state of one’s own heart.

Again and again, the cicada's untiring cry pierced the sultry summer air like a needle at work on thick cotton cloth.

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'.