“
That point in time just as the last leaf is about to drop, as the remaining petal is about to fall; that moment captures everything beautiful and sorrowful about life. Mono no aware, the Japanese call it.
”
”
Tan Twan Eng (The Garden of Evening Mists)
“
That feeling in your heart: it’s called mono no aware. It is a sense of the transience of all things in life. The sun, the dandelion, the cicada, the Hammer, and all of us: we are all subject to the equations of James Clerk Maxwell, and we are all ephemeral patterns destined to eventually fade, whether in a second or an eon.
”
”
Ken Liu (The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories)
“
As for me, I see both beauty and the dark side of the things; the loveliness of cornfields and full sails, but the ruin as the well. And I see them at the same time, and chary of that ecstasy. The Japanese have a phrase for this dual perception: mono no aware. It means "beauty tinged with sadness," for there cannot be any real beauty without the indolic whiff of decay. For me, living is the same thing as dying, and loving is the same thing as losing, and this does not make me a madwoman; I believe it can make me better at living, and better at loving, and, just possibly, better at seeing.
”
”
Sally Mann (Hold Still: A Memoir with Photographs)
“
Mono no aware, my son, is an empathy with the universe.
”
”
Ken Liu (The Future is Japanese: Science Fiction Futures and Brand New Fantasies from and about Japan)
“
I'm here to tell you the tide will never stop coming in.
I'm here to tell you whatever you build will be ruined, so make it beautiful.
”
”
Hala Alyan
“
Saatnya angin berbau asin datang dari laut.
Hari ini, aku akan bermain gekkin untukmu.
Suara denting senar melebur bersama udara, meresap dalam panca indera.
Terlihat seperti wewangian apakah nada-nada ini...
Dengan terlahirnya lagu ini, keberadaanmu mendapatkan makna baru.
Kalau bersedia, bernyanyilah bersamaku. Masih ada waktu sebelum gelap.
Waktu yang paling indah.
”
”
Hitoshi Ashinano (ヨコハマ買い出し紀行 4 [Yokohama Kaidashi Kikou 4])
“
Are you aware of the Japanese concept of mono no aware, the bitter sweetness of things?” “I’m afraid not.” “The Japanese sages say the best way to appreciate beauty is to focus on its transient, fragile and fleeting nature.
”
”
Adrian McKinty (I Hear the Sirens in the Street (Detective Sean Duffy #2))
“
mono no aware, the sadness of being human,
”
”
Barry Eisler (The Killer Collective (John Rain, #10; Ben Treven, #4; Livia Lone, #3))
“
We are defined by the places we hold in the web of others' lives
”
”
Ken Liu (Mono no aware)
“
Lately I have found this everyday remarkableness almost overwhelming. As I said, I’ve never been much for stoicism, but these last few years, I have been even more susceptible than usual to emotion—or, rather, to one emotion in particular. As far as I know, it has no name in our language, although it is close to what the Portuguese call saudade and the Japanese call mono no aware. It is the feeling of registering, on the basis of some slight exposure, our existential condition: how lovely life is, and how fragile, and how fleeting. Although this feeling is partly a response to our place in the universe, it is not quite the same as awe, because it has too much of the everyday in it, and too much sorrow, too.
”
”
Kathryn Schulz (Lost & Found: A Memoir)
“
One lovely twilight, with the near garden in riotous bloom, Genji stepped onto a gallery that gave him a view of the sea, and such was the supernal grace of his motionless figure that he seemed in that setting not to be of this world at all. Over soft white silk twill and aster 49 he wore a dress cloak of deep blue, its sash only very casually tied; and his voice slowly chanting “I, a disciple of the Buddha Shakyamuni…” 50 was more beautiful than any they had ever heard before. From boats rowing by at sea came a chorus of singing voices. With a pang he watched them, dim in the offing, like little birds borne on the waters, and sank into a reverie as cries from lines of geese on high mingled with the creaking of oars, until tears welled forth, and he brushed them away with a hand so gracefully pale against the black of his rosary that the young gentlemen pining for their sweethearts at home were all consoled.
”
”
Murasaki Shikibu (The Tale of Genji)
“
He glanced back at his ship, and a sigh escaped his lips, his heart fraught with the appreciation and melancholy that understanding his own situation must evince. His place as Captain of such a crew was as evanescent as the rest of life, and while they were all collected together now, being of the same character, the same mind, having the same predilections and ambitions, there was no saying when it might be over. He might be called away on urgent business, or his crew might grow anxious for a more settled life, Rannig might wish to return home, or the Director of the Marridon Academy might finally rot, calling Bartleby back to Marridon for the promotion he so richly deserved. He exhaled, reveling in the pining sigh of impermanence which living in such uncertainty must produce.
”
”
Michelle Franklin (The Leaf Flute - A Marridon Novella)
“
I thought of how Midori had once articulated the idea of mono no aware, a sensibility that, though frequently obscured during cherry blossom viewing by the cacophony of drunken doggerel and generator-powered television sets, remains steadfast in one of the two cultures from which I come. She had called it “the sadness of being human.” A wise, accepting sadness, she had said. I admired her for the depths of character such a description indicated. For me, sad has always been a synonym for bitter, and I suspect this will always be so.
”
”
Barry Eisler (A Lonely Resurrection (John Rain, #2))
“
I believe that when we put our things in order and strengthen our bonds with what we own, we get back in touch with that delicate sensitivity to mono no aware.
”
”
Marie Kondō (Spark Joy: An Illustrated Master Class on the Art of Organizing and Tidying Up (The Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up))
“
AWARE
The great sigh of things. To be aware of aware (pronounced ah-WAH-ray) is to be able to name the previously ineffable sigh of impermanence, the whisper of life flitting by, of time itself, the realization of evanescence. Aware is the shortened version of the crucial Japanese phrase mono-no-aware, which suggested sensitivity or sadness during the Heian period, but with a hint of actually relishing the melancholy of it all. Originally, it was an interjection of surprise, as in the English “Oh!” The reference calls up bittersweet poetic feelings around sunset, long train journeys, looking out at the driving rain, birdsong, the falling of autumn leaves. A held-breath word, it points like a finger to the moon to suggest an unutterable moment, too deep for words to reach. If it can be captured at all, it is by haiku poetry, the brushstroke of calligraphy, the burbling water of the tea ceremony, the slow pull of the bow from the oe. The great 16th-century wandering poet Matsuo Basho caught the sense of aware in his haiku: “By the roadside grew / A rose of Sharon. / My horse / Has just eaten it.” A recent Western equivalent would be the soughing lyric of English poet Henry Shukman, who writes, “This is a day that decides by itself to be beautiful.
”
”
Phil Cousineau (Wordcatcher: An Odyssey into the World of Weird and Wonderful Words)
“
Mono no aware—it’s a Japanese phrase expressing a love for impermanence, the ephemeral nature of all things.
”
”
Emiko Jean (Tokyo Ever After (Tokyo Ever After, #1))
“
I had such a strong awareness that one day, I was going to be gone, but the trees would still be here, the moon would still be above them, shining down, and it made me cry, but a good kind of crying, because I knew it had to be that way. I had to accept it because that’s the way things are. Things end. That’s mono no aware.
”
”
Barry Eisler (A Clean Kill in Tokyo (John Rain #1))
“
Everything passes, Hiroto,” Dad said. “That feeling in your heart: It’s called mono no aware. It is a sense of the transience of all things in life. The sun, the dandelion, the cicada, the Hammer, and all of us: We are all subject to the equations of James Clerk Maxwell and we are all ephemeral patterns destined to eventually fade, whether in a second or an eon.
”
”
Anonymous
Ken Liu (The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories)
“
The most difficult thing about life is how everything feels just as fleeting as it does endless.
”
”
J. Andrew Schrecker
“
A five years old child may be aware of only 2 members for each word family he knows; perhaps one is the root word (i. e., mono-morphemic words) and the other is the complex one. Accordingly, Anglin (1993, 69-72) sustains that root words constitute 31% of the first grade English children’s vocabulary, whereas compound and derived words together constitute 41% of the first grade English children’s vocabulary.
”
”
Endri Shqerra (Acquisition of Word Formation Devices in First & Second Languages: Morphological Cross-linguistic Influence)
“
There is a beautiful Japanese expression ‘mono no aware’, which roughly translates as ‘the sadness of things’.
”
”
Steven Wilson (Limited Edition of One)
“
I smooth my jeans and look out the window at the park we're passing. A couple kisses under a cherry blossom tree, their bodies lit from behind by a street lamp. Blooms flutter around them like paper snow. The buds have just opened and already they're dying. Mono no aware---it's a Japanese phrase expressing a love for impermanence, the ephemeral nature of all things.
”
”
Emiko Jean (Tokyo Ever After (Tokyo Ever After, #1))
“
The stars shine and blink.
We are all guests passing through,
A smile and a name.
”
”
Ken Liu (Mono no aware)
“
Lei aveva lasciato il Vietnam, ma il Vietnam non aveva lasciato lei; quel paese le era rimasto dentro come un vaso di Pandora da cui non osava separarsi, pur sapendo che sarebbe stato straziante, e pericoloso, sollevarne il coperchio. Mono no aware, dicono i giapponesi per il indicare la malinconia delle cose
”
”
Minh Tran Huy (La Princesse et le Pêcheur)
“
Every so often night plays these little tricks. A knot of air pushes quietly through the darkness, and a feeling that has converged in some far-off place tumbles down like a falling star and lands just in front of you, and then you wake up. Two people live the same dream. All this takes place in the space of a single night, and the feeling only lasts until morning. The next morning it gets lost in the light, and you’re no longer even sure it happened. But nights like this are long. They continue forever, glittering like a jewel.
”
”
Banana Yoshimoto (Goodbye Tsugumi)
Ken Liu (The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories)
Barry Eisler (Winner Take All (John Rain #3))
“
That day, my Master spoke about a concept associated with that iconic flower of Japan, "mono no aware", which meant the impermanence of things. That nothing in this life lasted, just like the short-lived bloom of the sakura. We would never pass the same moment again twice.
”
”
Amelia Danver (Bound to You in Japan (The Brotherhood, #2))
“
I felt like Schrödinger’s cat. She would come, or not come. She would take me in, or throw me out. She would forgive me, or tell me to fuck off. And in that narrow, purgatorial space, a feeling crept in, a kind of mourning for my younger self and all his terrible choices, and a wish that I could somehow tell him what I knew now and help him for both our sakes to get it right, and a grief that such a thing was impossible, the young man’s blindness irreparable, his mistakes immutable, the consequences irreversible. And then I smiled, thinking of mono no aware, the sadness of being human, aware of the irony of having traveled all the way to Paris to feel something so quintessentially Japanese.
”
”
Barry Eisler (The Killer Collective (John Rain, #10; Ben Treven, #4; Livia Lone, #3))
“
În ziua aceea, am crezut că dețin ceva, un adevăr care-mi va schimba viața. Însă nimic de această natură nu e dobândit pentru totdeauna. Lumea trece prin noi ca o apă și pentru o vreme ne împrumută aparența ei. Apoi se retrage și ne lasă în fața vidului pe care-l purtăm în noi, în fața acestui soi de incapacitate capitală a sufletului pe care trebuie să învățăm s-o suportăm, s-o înfruntăm și care, paradoxal, e poate resortul nostru cel mai sigur.
”
”
Nicolas Bouvier (The Way of the World)
“
Zen practice stresses the focus on the here and now, sitting with whole awareness, and immersing the mind with unity of all things. This practice gives way to a feeling of spaciousness, where extreme emotions subside and new insights reveal the nature of one’s true self. Zen aesthetics that apply to Japanese haiku often contain one or more of these qualities: Wabi–simplicity, imperfection Sabi–the beauty of loneliness or tranquility Mono no aware-the "ah-ness" of things, as in the transience of the falling cherry blossom petals. Yugen-a mystery deep within things, such as a mountain-top glimpsed through haze. Makoto-sincerity: intense, spontaneous emotional responses.[ 12]
”
”
Terri Glass (The Wild Horse of Haiku: Beauty in a Changing Form)