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“If my self was my dwelling, then my body resembled an orchard that surrounded it.”
― Yukio Mishima, Sun and Steel

“His friends were probably right when they called it a pitiful little vacant house. He wondered if that had anything to do with the emptiness of his own world.”
― Yukio Mishima, The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea

“In its essence, any art that relies on words makes use of their ability to eat away—of their corrosive function—just as etching depends on the corrosive power of nitric acid. Yet the simile is not accurate enough; for the copper and the nitric acid used in etching are on a par with each other, both being extracted from nature, while the relation of words to reality is not that of the acid to the plate. 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 themselves will be corroded too. It might be more appropriate, in fact, to liken their action to that of excess stomach fluids that digest and gradually eat away the stomach itself.”
― Yukio Mishima, Sun & Steel

“Everyone has, or should have, a desert island list against that day when, fleeing one’s enemies, one is cast ashore, or when one limps away, all warfare done, to pass the rest of one’s time quietly reading. If”
― Harold Bloom, The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages