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.

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

We live in an age in which there is no heroic death.

Suddenly the full long wail of a ship's horn surged through the open window and flooded the dim room—a cry of boundless, dark, demanding grief; pitch-black and glabrous as a whale's back and burdened with all the passions of the tides, the memory of voyages beyond counting, the joys, the humiliations: the sea was screaming.

There isn't any fear in existence itself, or any uncertainty, but living creates it.

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

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.