The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea Quotes

“...living is merely the chaos of existence...”
― Yukio Mishima, The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea

“An ugliness unfurled in the moonlight and soft shadow and suffused the whole world. If I were an amoeba, he thought, with an infinitesimal body, I could defeat ugliness. A man isn’t tiny or giant enough to defeat anything.”
― Yukio Mishima, The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea

“Real danger is nothing more than just living. Of course, living is merely the chaos of existence, but more than that it's a crazy mixed-up business of dismantling existence instant by instant to the point where the original chaos is restored, and taking strength from the uncertainty and the fear that chaos brings to re-create existence instant by instant. You won't find another job as dangerous as that. There isn't any fear in existence itself, or any uncertainty, but living creates it.”
― Yukio Mishima, The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea

“Still immersed in his dream, he drank down the tepid tea. It tasted bitter. Glory, as anyone knows, is bitter stuff.”
― Yukio Mishima, The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea

“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.”
― Yukio Mishima, The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea

“There isn't any fear in existence itself, or any uncertainty, but living creates it.”
― Yukio Mishima, The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea

“Possibly a man who hates the land should dwell on shore forever. Alienation and the long voyages at sea will compel him once again to dream of it, torment him with the absurdity of longing for something that he loathes.”
― Yukio Mishima, The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea

“It was the sea that made me begin thinking secretly about love more than anything else; you know, a love worth dying for, or a love that consumes you. To a man locked up in a steel ship all the time, the sea is too much like a woman. Things like her lulls and storms, or her caprice, or the beauty of her breast reflecting the setting sun, are all obvious. More than that, you’re in a ship that mounts the sea and rides her and yet is constantly denied her. It’s the old saw about miles and miles of lovely water and you can’t quench your thirst. Nature surrounds a sailor with all these elements so like a woman and yet he is kept as far as a man can be from her warm, living body. That’s where the problem begins, right there—I’m sure of it.”
― Yukio Mishima, The Sailor Who Fell from Grace With the Sea

“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.”
― Yukio Mishima, The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea

“There is no such thing as a good father because the role itself is bad. Strict fathers, soft fathers, nice moderate fathers — one's as bad as another. They stand in the way of our progress while they try to burden us with their inferiority complexes, and their unrealized aspirations, and their resentments, and their ideals, and the weaknesses they've never told anyone about, and their sins, and their sweeter-than-honey dreams, and the maxims they've never had the courage to live by — they'd like to unload all that silly crap on us, all of it!”
― Yukio Mishima, The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea

“Suddenly the full long wail of a ship's horn surged through the open window and flooded the dim room - a cry of boundless, dark, demanding grief; pitch-black and glabrous as a whale's back and burdened with all the passions of the tides, the memory of voyages beyond counting, the joys, the humiliations: the sea was screaming. Full of the glitter and the frenzy of night, the horn thundered in, conveying from the distant offing, from the dead center of the sea, a thirst for the dark nectar in the little room.”
― Yukio Mishima, The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea

“A man isn't tiny or giant enough to defeat anything”
― Yukio Mishima, The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea

“Glory, as anyone knows, is bitter stuff.”
― Yukio Mishima, The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea

“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.”
― Yukio Mishima, The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea

“حتى وإن أبحرت سنوات عديدة، لن تعتاد يوماً على العواصف، وفي كل مرة تتساءل إن كنت ستودع الحياة".”
― Yukio Mishima, البحار الذي لفظه البحر

“..and certain that life consisted of a few simple signals and decisions; that death took root at the moment of birth and man’s only recourse thereafter was to water and tend it; that propagation was a fiction; consequently, society was a fiction too; that fathers and teachers, by virtue of being fathers and teachers, were guilty of a grievous sin.”
― Yukio Mishima, The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea

“قرر أنّ يراقب بعناية كيف يمكن لشخص قريب إلى هذا الحد أنّ يقدر برمشة عين أن ينسحب إلى مسافةٍ لا يمكن بلوغها”
― Yukio Mishima, البحار الذي لفظه البحر

“All six of us are geniuses. And the world, as you know, is empty.”
― Yukio Mishima, The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea

“He found himself in the strange predicament all sailors share: essentially he belonged neither to the land nor to the sea. Possibly a man who hates the land should dwell on shore forever. Alienation and the long voyages at sea will compel him once again to dream of it, torment him with the absurdity of longing for something that he loathes.”
― Yukio Mishima, The Sailor Who Fell from Grace With the Sea

“He wanted to talk about the strange passion that catches hold of a man by the scruff of his neck and transports him to a realm beyond the fear of death.”
― Yukio Mishima, The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea

“Her nose was perfect; her lips exquisite. Like a master placing a go stone on the board after long deliberation, he placed the details of her beauty one by one in the misty dark and drew back to savour them.”
― Yukio Mishima, The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea

“This time, Fusako was able to express herself with fluency and candor. The bold letters she had been writing week after week had granted her an unexpected new freedom.”
― Yukio Mishima, The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea

“And it seemed increasingly obvious that the world would have to topple if he was to attain the glory that was rightfully his. They were consubstantial: glory and the capsized world.”
― Yukio Mishima, The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea

“They had laid the tender, down-ruffled little bird on a platter and appeared now to be pondering a way to eat out its heart without causing it distress.”
― Yukio Mishima, The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea

“At thirteen, Noboru was convinced of his own genius (each of the others in the gang felt the same way) and certain that life consisted of a few simple signals and decisions; that death took root at the moment of birth and man's only recourse thereafter was to water and tend it; that propagation was a fiction; consequently, society was a fiction too: that fathers and teachers, by virtue of being fathers and teachers, were guilty of a grievous sin. Therefore, his own father's death, when he was eight, had been a happy incident, something to be proud of.”
― Yukio Mishima, The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea

“The whole house is spic and span and everybody's supposed to be real honest and full of what he calls 'the good'. We even leave food out for the mice in the rafters so they won't have to sin by stealing. And you know what happens when dinner's over? Everybody hunches over and licks his place clean so none of God's grace will be wasted.”
― Yukio Mishima, The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea

“But the tears of joy had washed anxiety away and lifted them to a height where nothing was impossible. Ryuji was as if paralyzed: the sight of familiar places, places they had visited together, failed to move him. That Yamashita Park and Marine Tower should now appear just as he had often pictured them seemed only obvious, inevitable. And the smoking drizzle of rain, by softening the too distinct scenery and making of it something closer to the images in memory, only heightened the reality of it all. Ryuji expected for some time after he disembarked to feel the world tottering precariously beneath his feet, and yet today more than ever before, like a piece in a jigsaw puzzle, he felt snugly in place in an anchored, amiable world.”
― Yukio Mishima, The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea

“Besides, like a man who knows he is dying, he felt a need to be equally tender to all.”
― Yukio Mishima, The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea / Temple of the Golden Pavilion / Confessions of a Mask

“I think it's a wonderful song," she said. But she was only shielding his pride, he knew. Obviously this was the first time she had ever heard the song, though she pretended to know it well. She can't penetrate to the feelings deep down in a song like this; or see through the murk of my manhood to the longing that sometimes makes me weep; fair enough: then as far as I'm concerned, she's just another body.”
― Yukio Mishima, The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea

“Since dark antiquity the words have been spoken by women of every caste to sailors in every port; words of docile acceptance of the horizon's authority, of reckless homage to that mysterious azure boundary; words never failing to bestow on even the haughtiest woman the sadness, the hollow hopes, and the freedom of the whore: 'You'll be leaving in the morning, won't you?...”
― Yukio Mishima, The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea