True beauty is something that attacks, overpowers, robs, and finally destroys.

Perfect purity is possible if you turn your life into a line of poetry written with a splash of blood.

Beauty is something that burns the hand when you touch it.

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.

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

Possessing by letting go of things was a secret of ownership unknown to youth.

We live in an age in which there is no heroic death.

When silence is prolonged over a certain period of time, it takes on new meaning.

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

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

Anything can become excusable when seen from the standpoint of the result

We are not wounded so deeply when betrayed by the things we hope for as when betrayed by things we try our best to despise. In such betrayal comes the dagger in the back.

If the world changed, i could not exist, and if i changed, the world could not exist

...living is merely the chaos of existence...

A samurai is a total human being, whereas a man who is completely absorbed in his technical skill has degenerated into a ‘function’, one cog in a machine.

The instant that the blade tore open his flesh, the bright disk of the sun soared up and exploded behind his eyelids.

Other people must be destroyed. In order that I might truly face the sun, the world itself must be destroyed....

...of all the kinds of decay in this world, decadent purity is the most malignant.

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?

There isn't any fear in existence itself, or any uncertainty, but living creates it.

There's a huge seal called 'impossibility' pasted all over this world. And don't ever forget that we're the only ones who can tear it off once and for all.

When people concentrate on the idea of beauty, they are, without realizing it, confronted with the darkest thoughts that exist in this world. That, I suppose, is how human beings are made.

For clearly it is impossible to touch eternity with one hand and life with the other.

History knew the truth. History was the most inhuman product of humanity.It scooped up the whole of human will and, like the goddess Kali in Calcutta, dripped blood from its mouth as it bit and crunched.

A man isn't tiny or giant enough to defeat anything

He felt that taking naps was much more beneficial than confronting catastrophes.

I cried sobbingly until at last those visions reeking with blood came to comfort me. And then I surrendered myself to them, to those deplorably brutal visions, my most intimate friends.

For a long time I had not approached the forbidden fruit called happiness, but it was now tempting me with a melancholy persistence. I felt as though Sonoko were an abyss above which I stood poised.

Still immersed in his dream, he drank down the tepid tea. It tasted bitter. Glory, as anyone knows, is bitter stuff.

It is a rather risky matter to discuss a happiness that has no need of words.

Again and again, the cicada’s untiring cry pierced the sultry summer air like a needle at work on thick cotton cloth.

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

The cynicism that regards hero worship as comical is always shadowed by a sense of physical inferiority

For me, beauty is always retreating from one’s grasp: the only thing I consider important is what existed once, or ought to have existed.

It is a common failing of childhood to think that if one makes a hero out of a demon the demon will be satisfied.

No human being can be so honest as to become completely false.

All six of us are geniuses. And the world, as you know, is empty.

Thus in a single phrase I can define the great illusion concerning 'love' in this world. It is the effort to join reality with the apparition.

Human beings, Isao realized, could descend to communicating their feelings like dogs barking in the distance on a cold night.

A father is a reality-concealing machine, a machine for dishing up lies to kids, and that isn't even the worst of it: secretly he believes that he represents reality.

The parting, like the white fruit of an apple discolouring instantly around the bite, had begun three days before when they had met aboard the Rakuyo.

It seemed that hell could appear day or night, at any time, at any place, simply in response to one's thoughts or wishes. It seemed that we could summon it at our pleasure and that instantly it would appear.

There is no virtue in curiosity. In fact, it might even be the most immoral desire a man can possess.

Beyond doubt it would speedily verify the proverb that a nation must ravage itself before foreigners can ravage it, a man must despise himself before others can despise him.

Let the darkness that is in my heart become equal to the darkness of the night that surrounds those innumerable lights!

Everybody's the same. People are all the same. But it’s the prerogative of youth to think it’s not so.

…In the very simplicity of her desire to punish herself appeared egoism in its purest form. Never before had this woman who seemed to think only of herself experienced an egoism so immaculate.

We human beings sometimes steer off in a direction in which we hope to find something a little bit better.

We all know that the world is empty and that the important thing, the only thing, is to try to maintain order in that emptiness.

Just now I had a dream. I'll see you again. I know it. Beneath the falls.