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.

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And I can't complain. After all, only women are able really to love.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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From the way of Go the beauty of Japan and the Orient had fled. Everything had become science and regulation.

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I suppose even a woman's hatred is a kind of love.

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They were words that came out of nothing, but they seemed to him somehow significant. He muttered them over again.

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I wonder what the retirement age is in the novel business. The day you die.

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The woman was silent, her eyes on the floor. Shimamura had come to a point where he knew he was only parading his masculine shamelessness, and yet it seemed likely enough that the woman was familiar with the failing and need not be shocked by it. He looked at her. Perhaps it was the rich lashes of the downcast eyes that made her face seem warm and sensuous. She shook her head very slightly, and again a faint blush spread over her face.

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