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

A feeling of liberation should contain a bracing feeling of negation, in which liberation itself is not negated. At the moment a captive lion steps out of his cage, he possesses a wider world than the lion who has known only the wilds. While he was in captivity, there were only two worlds to him; the world of the cage, and the world outside the cage. Now he is free. He roars. He attacks people. Furthermore, he eats them. Yet he is not satisfied, for there is no third world that is neither the world of the cage nor the world outside the cage. Netsuke however, had in her heart not the slightest interest in these matters. Her soul knew nothing but affirmation.

— Yukio Mishima

Again and again, the cicada’s untiring cry pierced the sultry summer air like a needle at work on thick cotton cloth.

— Yukio Mishima

Again, there were maidens who cherished the firm belief that he had come from the sea. Because within his breast could be heard the roaring of the sea. Because in the pupils of his eyes there lingered the mysterious and eternal horizon that the sea leaves as a keepsake deep in the eyes of all who are born at the seaside and forced to depart from it. Because his signs were sultry like the tidal breezes of full summer, fragrant with the smell of seaweed cast upon the shore.

— Yukio Mishima

Amid the moon and the stars, amid the clouds of the night, amid the hills which bordered on the sky with their magnificent silhouette of pointed cedars, amid the speckled patches of the moon, amid the temple buildings that emerged sparkling white-out of the surrounding darkness - amid all this, I was intoxicated by the pellucid beauty of Biko's treachery.

— Yukio Mishima

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

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

Beauty is something that burns the hand when you touch it.

— Yukio Mishima

Because the fact of not being understood by other people had become my only real source of pride, I was never confronted by any impulse to express things and to make others understand something that I knew.

— Yukio Mishima

Better to be caught in sudden, complete catastrophe than to be gnawed by the cancer of imagination.

— Yukio Mishima