“There is something that even now strikes me as strange. Originally I was not possessed by gloomy thoughts. My concern, what confronted me with my real problem, was beauty alone. But I do not think that the war affected me by filling my mind with gloomy thoughts. When people concentrate on the idea of beauty, they are, without realizing it, confronted with the darkest thoughts that exist in this world. That, I suppose, is how human beings are made.”
The Temple of the Golden Pavilion (1959).
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Yukio Mishima 60
Japanese author 1925–1970Related quotes
Another version of this quotation, omitting the "of me" phrase, appears in Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley F.R.S (1900) edited by Leonard Huxley, p. 170
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John Banville, The Art of Fiction No. 200 (2009)
“I thought it strange that my teacher could not show me love.”
Source: The Story of My Life (1903), Ch. 6
Context: I remember the morning that I first asked the meaning of the word, "love." This was before I knew many words. I had found a few early violets in the garden and brought them to my teacher. She tried to kiss me: but at that time I did not like to have any one kiss me except my mother. Miss Sullivan put her arm gently round me and spelled into my hand, "I love Helen."
"What is love?" I asked.
She drew me closer to her and said, "It is here," pointing to my heart, whose beats I was conscious of for the first time. Her words puzzled me very much because I did not then understand anything unless I touched it.
I smelt the violets in her hand and asked, half in words, half in signs, a question which meant, "Is love the sweetness of flowers?"
"No," said my teacher.
Again I thought. The warm sun was shining on us.
"Is this not love?" I asked, pointing in the direction from which the heat came. "Is this not love?"
It seemed to me that there could be nothing more beautiful than the sun, whose warmth makes all things grow. But Miss Sullivan shook her head, and I was greatly puzzled and disappointed. I thought it strange that my teacher could not show me love.
Describing Hillary Clinton's influence on Gillibrand's entering politics
[The Reintroduction of Kirsten Gillibrand, Rodrick, Stephen, New York Magazine, New York Media Holdings, 2009-06-07, 2011-02-04, http://nymag.com/news/politics/57197/]
Attributed