Yukio Mishima: Frasi in inglese (pagina 2)

Origine: The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea

Origine: Spring Snow

Origine: The Temple of the Golden Pavilion

Origine: Runaway Horses

Origine: The Decay of the Angel

Addressing the SPF Garrison at Ichigaya Camp during his failed coup attempt, as quoted at "Yukio Mishima" by Kerry Bolton at Counter Currents Publishing http://www.counter-currents.com/2011/01/yukio-mishima-2/; upon going back inside he is said to have commented to his followers: "I don't think they even heard me".
Final address (1970)

As quoted by Mishima's biographer, Henry Scott-Stokes in the documentary Yukio Mishima : Samurai Writer (1985)

Origine: Confessions of a Mask (1949), p. 118.
Contesto: At no time are we ever in such complete possession of a journey, down to its last nook and cranny, as when we are busy with preparations for it. After that, there remains only the journey itself, which is nothing but the process through which we lose our ownership of it.

As quoted in Mishima : A Life in Four Chapters (1985).
Contesto: All my life I have been acutely aware of a contradiction in the very nature of my existence. For forty-five years I struggled to resolve this dilemma by writing plays and novels. The more I wrote, the more I realized mere words were not enough. So I found another form of expression.

Origine: Sun and Steel (1968), p. 9.
Contesto: Words are a medium that reduces reality to abstraction for transmission to our reason, and in their power to corrode reality inevitably lurks the danger that the words will be corroded too. It might be more appropriate, in fact, to liken their action to excessive stomach fluids that digest and gradually eat away the stomach itself.
Many people will express disbelief that such a process could already be at work in a person's earliest years. But that, beyond doubt, is what happened to me personally, thereby laying the ground for two contradictory tendencies within myself. One was the determination to press ahead loyally with the corrosive function of words, and to make that my life's work. The other was the desire to encounter reality in some field where words should play no part at all.

Origine: Confessions of a Mask (1949), p. 153.
Contesto: My "act" has ended by becoming an integral part of my nature, I told myself. It's no longer an act. My knowledge that I am masquerading as a normal person has even corroded whatever of normality I originally possessed, ending by making me tell myself over and over again that it too was nothing but a pretense of normality. To say it another way, I'm becoming the sort of person who can't believe in anything except the counterfeit.

Origine: The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea

Origine: The Temple of the Golden Pavilion

Origine: Thirst for Love

Origine: The Temple of the Golden Pavilion

Origine: Runaway Horses

Origine: Confessions of a Mask (1949), p. 208.
Contesto: I received an impassioned letter from Sonoko. There was no doubt that she was truly in love. I felt jealous. Mine was the unbearable jealousy a cultured pearl must feel toward a genuine one. Or can there be such a thing in this world as a man who is jealous of the woman who loves him, precisely because of her love?

Origine: The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea