for me he represented my first revelation of a certain power, my first summons by a certain strange and secret voice.

I kept my solitary agonies locked in my breast.

I was choked by desire, thinking, " I want to change into him, " thinking, " I want to be him. "

I heard the sound of a piano, clumsily played.

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.

the loss of self through sex gives us little satisfaction.

the vague uneasiness surrounding my sexual feelings had practically made the carnal world an obsession with me.

actually the action called a kiss represented nothing more for me than some place where my spirit could seek shelter.

creatures, beauty is a perfect abstraction and creation of life itself. nothing is so similar to life as music.

yet how strange a thing is the beauty of music! the brief beauty that the player brings into being transforms a given period of time into continuance; it is certain to never be repeated; like the existence of dayflies and other such short lived

and the trap into which a deformed person finally falls does not lie in his resolving the state of antagonism between himself and the world, but instead takes the form of his completely approving of this antagonism.

what is there, then, at the outermost edge? nothing, perhaps, save a few ribbons, dangling into the void.

although the goal could never have been love, nor, had it been, could I ever have belonged to the heavens?

unanswered signal of a telephone ringing in a dark room of a distant city.

I am the man who comes and goes between the bar and the telephone booth. or, rather: that man is called “ I “ and you know nothing else about him, just as this station is called only “ station “ and beyond it there exists nothing except the

his sighs were sultry like the tidal breezes of full summer, fragrant with a smell of seaweed cast up upon the shore.

they stood looking down at my corpse.

when anger makes them reveal in a flash, human nature in all its horror.

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.

it cannot be that?”

much pain? what was the basis of this creature’s existence? was the basis within me? or was it within the creature itself? yet this creature which has been pulled out of my mouth and which now lies in my hand is something utterly different. surely

me is now merely a dead object. but is this thing really the same as that thing? if this originally belonged to my outer existence, why —— though what sort of providence —— did it become attached to my inner self and succeed in causing me so

blood — stained tooth lying in one’s hand, one’s thoughts are likely to be as follows: “is this it? is this all it was? that thing that caused me so much pain, which constantly made me fret about its existence, which was stubbornly rooted within

beauty is like a decayed tooth. it rubs against one’s tongue, insisting on its own existence, finally, it gets so that one cannot stand the pain and one goes to the dentist to have the tooth extracted, then, as one looks at the small, dirty, brown,

the past does not draw us back to the past. there are certain memories of the past that have strong steel springs and, when we who live in the present touch them, they are suddenly stretched taut and then they propel us into the future.

although the goal could never have been love, nor, had it been, could I ever have belonged to the heavens?

before the sea's repletion, a loneliness that outwardly resembled his, I wanted to savor it completely, through his very eyes.

my long — felt attraction toward the loneliness that filled Omi's life —— loneliness born of the fact that life had enslaved him —— had first made me want to possess the same quality; and now that I was experiencing, in this feeling of emptiness

what transforms this world is knowledge.

before the sea's repletion, a loneliness that outwardly resembled his, I wanted to savor it completely, through his very eyes.