Literary Birthday – 11 June – Yasunari Kawabata

Yasunari Kawabata was born 11 June 1899, and died 16 April 1972.

Seven 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.
My own works have been described as works of emptiness, but it is not to be taken for the nihilism of the West.
Put your soul in the palm of my hand for me to look at, like a crystal jewel. I’ll sketch it in words.
I wonder what the retirement age is in the novel business. The day you die.
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’.
Lunatics have no age. If we were crazy, you and I, we might be a great deal younger.
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 was a Japanese short story writer and novelist whose spare, lyrical, subtly-shaded prose works won him the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1968. He was the first Japanese author to receive the award. He is the author of Snow Country.