Marianna

“Jack failed to understand Peter's excitement. Why, exactly, was he dancing? Because he was dissatisfied about something? Because he was happy? Or because it was at least better than killing himself?...

What exactly did Peter believe in, wondered Jack in his transparency, watching Peter's body dancing, glinting, in the light of the bonfire. Had it all been lies, then - what Peter had once told him of the misery that settled on him every night like a heavy, sodden wad of cotton? Why, when solitude howling like the sea bestrode the gaudy lights of the nocturnal city, should one proceed to dance?

That was the point, Jack himself was convinced, at which everything stopped. He, at least, had stopped. And then, little by little, he had become transparent....”
― Yukio Mishima, Acts of Worship: Seven Stories

“A lyric poet of twenty might manage it, but I am
twenty no longer, and have never been a poet at any
rate.”
― Yukio Mishima, Sun and Steel

“Irritation and contempt were, after all, not things one felt for people far removed from oneself.”
― Saou Ichikawa, Hunchback

“He seemed familiar somehow. Like someone who should have been mine.”
― Genki Ferguson, Satellite Love