However, as words become particularized, and as men begin - in however small a way - to use them in personal, arbitrary ways, so their transformation into art begins. It was words of this kind that, descending on me like a swarm of winged insects, seized on my individuality and sought to shut me up within it. Nevertheless, despite the enemy's depredations upon my person, I turned their universality - at once a weapon and a weakness - back on them, and to some extent succeeded in using words to universalize to my own individuality.
Yukio MishimaAn ugliness unfurled in the moonlight and soft shadow and suffused the whole world. If I were an amoeba, he thought, with an infinitesimal body, I could defeat ugliness. A man isnโt tiny or giant enough to defeat anything.
Yukio MishimaIs there not a sort of remorse that precedes sin? Was it remorse at the very fact that I existed?
Yukio MishimaI still have no way to survive but to keep writing one line, one more line, one more line.
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 Mishima