Top 60 Yasunari Kawabata Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “THE TRAIN came out of the long tunnel into the snow country.”

— Yasunari Kawabata

Featured in: Country Quotes

2. “People have separated from each other with walls of concrete that blocked the roads to connection and love. and Nature has been defeated in the name of development.”

— Yasunari Kawabata

3. “Cosmic time is the same for everyone, but human time differs with each person. Time flows in the same way for all human beings; every human being flows through time in a different way.”

— Yasunari Kawabata

4. “Our language is primarily for expressing human goodness and beauty.”

— Yasunari Kawabata

5. “The winter moon becomes a companion, the heart of the priest, sunk in meditation upon religion and philosophy, there in the mountain hall, is engaged in a delicate interplay and exchange with the moon; and it is this of which the poet sings.”

— Yasunari Kawabata

6. “Lunatics have no age. If we were crazy, you and I, we might be a great deal younger.”

— Yasunari Kawabata

7. “The true joy of a moonlit night is something we no longer understand. Only the men of old, when there were no lights, could understand the true joy of a moonlit night.”

— Yasunari Kawabata

8. “Because you cannot see him, God is everywhere.”

— Yasunari Kawabata

9. “As he caught his footing, his head fell back, and the Milky Way flowed down inside him with a roar.”

— Yasunari Kawabata

10. “It’s remarkable how we go on year after year, doing the same old things. We get tired and bored, and ask when they’ll come for us.”

— Yasunari Kawabata

11. “The labor into which a heart has poured its whole love – where will it have its say, to excite and inspire, and when?”

— Yasunari Kawabata

12. “A poetess who had died young of cancer had said in one of her poems that for her, on sleepless nights, ’the night offers toads and black dogs and corpses of the drowned.”

— Yasunari Kawabata

13. “The snow on the distant mountains was soft and creamy, as if veiled in a faint smoke.”

— Yasunari Kawabata

14. “Now, even more than the evening before, he could think of no one with whom to compare her. She had become absolute, beyond comparison. She had become decision and fate.”

— Yasunari Kawabata

15. “I suppose even a woman’s hatred is a kind of love.”

— Yasunari Kawabata

16. “A secret, if it’s kept, can be sweet and comforting, but once it leaks out it can turn on you with a vengeance.”

— Yasunari Kawabata

17. “Maybe vagueness has been good for me. The word means two different things in Tokyo and Osaka, you know. In Tokyo it means stupidity, but in Osaka they talk about vagueness in a painting and in a game of Go.”

— Yasunari Kawabata

18. “El tiempo corre de la misma manera para todos los seres humanos; pero todo ser humano flota de distinta manera en el tiempo.”

— Yasunari Kawabata

19. “The road was frozen. The village lay quiet under the cold sky. Komako hitched up the skirt of her kimono and tucked it into her obi. The moon shone like a blade frozen in blue ice.”

— Yasunari Kawabata

20. “Seeing the moon, he becomes the moon, the moon seen by him becomes him. He sinks into nature, becomes one with nature. The light of the “clear heart” of the priest, seated in the meditation hall in the darkness before the dawn, becomes for the dawn moon its own light.”

— Yasunari Kawabata

21. “A child walked by, rolling a metal hoop that made a sound of autumn.”

— Yasunari Kawabata

22. “From the way of Go the beauty of Japan and the Orient had fled. Everything had become science and regulation.”

— Yasunari Kawabata

23. “The high, thin nose was a little lonely, a little sad, but the bud of her lips opened and closed smoothly, like a beautiful little circle of leeches.”

— Yasunari Kawabata

24. “But a haiku by Buson came into his mind: ‘I try to forget this senile love; a chilly autumn shower.’ The gloom only grew denser.”

— Yasunari Kawabata

25. “But, drawn to her at that moment, he felt a quiet like the voice of the rain flow over him. He knew well enough that for her it was in fact no waste of effort, but somehow the final determination that it was had the effect of distilling and purifying the woman’s existence.”

— Yasunari Kawabata

26. “And I can’t complain. After all, only woemn are able really to love.”

— Yasunari Kawabata

27. “They were words that came out of nothing, but they seemed to him somehow significant. He muttered them over again.”

— Yasunari Kawabata

28. “Does pain go away and leave no trace, then?’ ‘You sometimes even feel sentimental for it.”

— Yasunari Kawabata

29. “Put your soul in the palm of my hand for me to look at, like a crystal jewel. I’ll sketch it in words...”

— Yasunari Kawabata

30. “Along the coast the sea roars, and inland the mountains roar – the roaring at the center, like a distant clap of thunder.”

— Yasunari Kawabata

31. “Nothing could be more comfortable than writing about the ballet from books. A ballet he had never seen was an art in another world. It was an unrivaled armchair reverie, a lyric from some paradise. He called his work research, but it was actually free, uncontrolled fantasy. He preferred not to savor the ballet in the flesh; rather he savored the phantasms of his own dancing imagination, called up by Western books and pictures. It was like being in love with someone he had never seen.”

— Yasunari Kawabata

32. “Your mother was such a gentle person. I always feel when I see someone like her that I’m watching the last flowers fall. This is no world for gentle people.”

— Yasunari Kawabata

33. “He could not call up the faces of his own mother and father, who had died three or four years before. He would look at a picture, and there they would be. Perhaps people were progressively harder to paint in the mind as they near one, loved by one. Perhaps clear memories came easily in proportion as they were ugly.”

— Yasunari Kawabata

34. “Do you think it’s right to not say goodbye to the man you yourself said was on the very first page of your very first volume of your diary? This is the very last page of his.”

— Yasunari Kawabata

35. “I wonder what the retirement age is in the novel business. The day you die.”

— Yasunari Kawabata

36. “He closed his eyes and the warmth sank into his head, bringing an immediate sense of life. Reality came through the violent breathing, and with a sort of nostalgic remorse. He felt as though he was waiting tranquilly for some undefined revenge.”

— Yasunari Kawabata

37. “This is no world for gentle people.”

— Yasunari Kawabata

38. “The notes went out crystalline into the clean winter morning, to sound on the far, snowy peaks.”

— Yasunari Kawabata

39. “Time flows in the same way for all human beings; every human being flows through time in a different way.”

— Yasunari Kawabata

40. “Supongo que en una mujer, hasta el odio es una forma del amor.”

— Yasunari Kawabata

41. “In the moonlight the fine geishalike skin took on the luster of a seashell.”

— Yasunari Kawabata

42. “Love is my only lifeline.”

— Yasunari Kawabata

43. “He was conscious of an emptiness that made him see Komako’s life as beautiful but wasted, even though he himself was the object of her love; and yet the woman’s existence, her straining to live, came touching him like naked skin. He pitied her, and he pitied himself.”

— Yasunari Kawabata

44. “In a gourd that had been handed down for three centuries, a flower that would fade in a morning.”

— Yasunari Kawabata

45. “A voice so beautiful it was almost lonely, calling out as if to someone who could not hear, on ship far away.”

— Yasunari Kawabata

46. “Women are odd,” he said, to extricate himself. “Two or three of them have told me they’re sure I modeled one of my characters on them. And they were complete strangers, women I’d had nothing to do with. What kind of delusion could that be?” “Lots of women are unhappy, so they console themselves with delusions.”

— Yasunari Kawabata

47. “In the depths of the mirror the evening landscape moved by, the mirror and the reflected figures like motion pictures superimposed one on the other. The figures and the background were unrelated, and yet the figures, transparent and intangible, and the background, dim in the gathering darkness, melted into a sort of symbolic world not of this world. Particularly when a light out in the mountains shone in the centre of the girl’s face, Shimamura felt his chest rise at the inexpressible beauty of it.”

— Yasunari Kawabata

48. “Even when natural weather is good, human weather is bad.”

— Yasunari Kawabata

49. “When you’re held by the dead, you begin to feel that you aren’t in this world yourself.”

— Yasunari Kawabata

50. “A feeling of nagging, hopeless impotence came over Shimamura at the thought that a simple misunderstanding had worked its way so deep into the woman’s being.”

— Yasunari Kawabata