Young people get the foolish idea that what is new for them must be new for everybody else too. No matter how unconventional they get, they're just repeating what others before them have done.
Yukio MishimaSuddenly the full long wail of a ship's horn surged through the open window and flooded the dim roomโa 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.
Yukio MishimaBy means of microscopic observation and astronomical projection the lotus flower can become the foundation for an entire theory of the universe and an agent whereby we may perceive Truth.
Yukio MishimaTime is what matters. As time goes by, you and I will be carried inexorably into the mainstream of our period, even though weโre unaware of what it is. And later, when they say that young men in the early Taisho era thought, dressed, talked, in such and such a way, theyโll be talking about you and me. Weโll all be lumped togetherโฆ. In a few decades, people will see you and the people you despise as one and the same, a single entity.
Yukio MishimaThere is no virtue in curiosity. In fact, it might be the most immoral desire a man can possess.
Yukio MishimaThis is a photograph, so it is as you see: there are no lies and no deceptions. One can detect here, elevated to an incomparably higher level, the same pathetic emotional appeal that lies concealed in every fake spiritualist photograph, every pornographic photograph; one comes to suspect that the strange, disturbing emotional appeal of the photographic art consists solely in that same repeated refrain: this is a true ghost... this is a photograph, so it is as you see: there are no lies, no deceptions.
Yukio Mishima