Yasunari Kawabata born in Osaka in 1899, grew up in the countryside after losing his parents early.
He studied at Tokyo Imperial University from 1920 to 1924 and co-founded Bungei Jidai a modern Japanese literary magazine.
His writing career began with “Izu dancer” in 1927. Kawabata became a prominent Japanese author with his novel “Snow Country” in 1937.
He joined Japan’s Art Academy in 1953 later leading the P.E.N. Club of Japan.
His famous works include “The Lake”, “The Sleeping Beauty” and “The Old Capital” with the latter gaining significant acclaim.
Kawabata was awarded the Goethe-medal in 1959 and tragically passed away in 1972.
Here are some of the best quotes by Yasunari Kawabata.
Top 10 Yasunari Kawabata Quotes
Because you cannot see him, God is everywhere. ~ Yasunari Kawabata.
I like the idea of saying thank you on behalf of the weather. ~ Yasunari Kawabata.
Even when natural weather is good, human weather is bad. ~ Yasunari Kawabata.
Our language is primarily for expressing human goodness and beauty. ~ Yasunari Kawabata.
Father’s life was only a very small part of the life of a tea bowl. ~ Yasunari Kawabata.
This is no world for gentle people. ~ Yasunari Kawabata.
The notes went out crystalline into the clean winter morning, to sound on the far, snowy peaks. ~ Yasunari Kawabata.
I wonder what the retirement age is in the novel business. The day you die. ~ Yasunari Kawabata.
Along the coast the sea roars, and inland the mountains roar – the roaring at the center, like a distant clap of thunder. ~ Yasunari Kawabata.
A voice so beautiful it was almost lonely, calling out as if to someone who could not hear, on ship far away. ~ Yasunari Kawabata.
Famous Yasunari Kawabata Quotes
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.
Time flows in the same way for all human beings; every human being flows through time in a different way. ~ Yasunari Kawabata.
A masterpiece of a game can be ruined by insensitivity to the feelings of an adversary. ~ Yasunari Kawabata.
And I can’t complain. After all, only women are able really to love. ~ Yasunari Kawabata.
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.
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.
In a gourd that had been handed down for three centuries, a flower that would fade in a morning. ~ Yasunari Kawabata.
THE TRAIN came out of the long tunnel into the snow country. ~ Yasunari Kawabata.
Your ears are lovely, he said, but there’s a kind of eerie beauty to your profile. ~ Yasunari Kawabata.
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.
The snow on the distant mountains was soft and creamy, as if veiled in a faint smoke. ~ Yasunari Kawabata.
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.
I could not bear the silences when the drum stopped. I sank down into the depths of the sound of the rain. ~ Yasunari Kawabata.
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.
Lovely Yasunari Kawabata Quotes
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.
Among those who give thoughts to things, is there one who does not think of suicide? ~ Yasunari Kawabata.
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.
When you’re held by the dead, you begin to feel that you aren’t in this world yourself. ~ Yasunari Kawabata.
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.
Does pain go away and leave no trace, then?’ ‘You sometimes even feel sentimental for it. ~ Yasunari Kawabata.
Any kind of inhumanity, given practice, becomes human. All the varieties of transgression are buried in the darkness of the world. ~ Yasunari Kawabata.
In the moonlight the fine geishalike skin took on the luster of a seashell. ~ Yasunari Kawabata.
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.
Beautiful Yasunari Kawabata Quotes
From the way of Go the beauty of Japan and the Orient had fled. Everything had become science and regulation. ~ Yasunari Kawabata.
They were words that came out of nothing, but they seemed to him somehow significant. He muttered them over again. ~ Yasunari Kawabata.
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.
Lunatics have no age. If we were crazy, you and I, we might be a great deal younger. ~ Yasunari Kawabata.
As he caught his footing, his head fell back, and the Milky Way flowed down inside him with a roar. ~ Yasunari Kawabata.
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.
Anyway, it’s hardly a problem worth worrying about. ~ Yasunari Kawabata.
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.
Best Yasunari Kawabata Quotes
For such a tiny death, the empty eight-mat room seemed enormous. ~ Yasunari Kawabata.
I suppose even a woman’s hatred is a kind of love. ~ Yasunari Kawabata.
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.
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.
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.
The single flower contains more brightness than a hundred flowers. ~ Yasunari Kawabata.
Stop. I don’t like it. I don’t like having people die. ~ Yasunari Kawabata.
Popular Yasunari Kawabata Quotes
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.
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.
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.
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.
Love is my only lifeline. ~ Yasunari Kawabata.
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.
So these were the 57 famous quotes about Yasunari Kawabata.
If you like these quotes and sayings, then you can also read my other posts on Karen Carpenter quotes and Lucille Clifton quotes.
