Yet how strange a thing is the beauty of music! The brief beauty that the player brings into being transforms a given period of time into pure continuance; it is certain never to be repeated; like the existence of dayflies and other such short-lived creatures, beauty is a perfect abstraction and creation of life itself. Nothing is so similar to life as music.

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

Time is what matters. As time goes by, you and I will be carried inexorably into the mainstream of our period, even though we’re 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, they’ll be talking about you and me. We’ll all be lumped together…. In a few decades, people will see you and the people you despise as one and the same, a single entity.

I still have no way to survive but to keep writing one line, one more line, one more line.

As long as you know I am waiting, take your time flowers of the spring.

Human life is limited but I would like to live forever.

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