Tale Of Genji Quotes

Real things in the darkness seem no realer than dreams.

There are as many sorts of women as there are women.

The world know it not; but you, Autumn, I confess it: your wind at night-fall stabs deep into my heart

If art is not to be life-enhancing, what is it to be? Half the world is feminine--why is there resentment at a female-oriented art? Nobody asks The Tale of Genji to be masculine! Women certainly learn a lot from books oriented toward a masculine world. Why is not the reverse also true? Or are men really so afraid of women's creativity (because they are not themselves at the center of creation, cannot bear children) that a woman writer of genius evokes murderous rage, must be brushed aside with a sneer as 'irrelevant'?

No art or learning is to be pursued halfheartedly...and any art worth learning will certainly reward more or less generously the effort made to study it.

Autumn is no time to lie alone

Ceaseless as the interminable voices of the bell-cricket, all night till dawn my tears flow.

Life is full of uncertainties, perhaps one day some unforeseen circumstance would bring her into his life once more

You are here to remind me of someone I long for, and what is it you long for yourself? We must have been together in an earlier life, you and I.

You that in far-off countries of the sky can dwell secure, look back upon me here; for I am weary of this frail world's decay.

One ought not to be unkind to a woman merely on account of her plainness, any more than one had a right to take liberties with her merely because she was handsome

If like the leaf of the wisteria through which the sun darts his rays transparently you give your heart to me, I will no longer distrust you

Why do you grieve so uselessly? Every uncertainty is the result of a certainty. There is nothing in this world really to be lamented.

Your coldness serves to emphasize my own inadequacy, and makes me feel that the best solution might be to expire.

Would that, like the smoke of the watch-fires that mounts and vanishes at random in the empty sky, the smouldering flame of passion could burn itself away

It is indeed in many ways more comfortable to belong to that section of society whose action are not publicly canvassed and discussed

I leave you, to go the road we all must go. The road I would choose, if only I could, is the other.

My dwelling is but a rustic cottage, but still I should like you to see, at least, the pretty mountain streamlet which waters my garden.

She was gentle and sedate as usual, but evidently absent and preoccupied. Her eyes rested on the dew lying on the grass in the garden, and her ears were intent upon the melancholy singing of the autumn insects. It was as if we were in a real romance.

No penance can your hard heart find save such as you long since have taught me to endure

Even those people who have no sorrow of their own often feel melancholy from the circumstances in which they are placed.

There is much to be said for cherry blossoms, but they seem so flighty. They are so quick to run off and leave you. And then just when your regrets are the strongest the wisteria comes into bloom, and it blooms on into the summer. There is nothing quite like it. Even the color is somehow companionable and inviting.

En asuntos de arte la modestia no es una virtud.

What need have I for a palace? Rather to lie with you where the weeds grow thick.

When in my present lonely lot, I feel my past has not been free From sins which I remember not, I dread more, what to come, may be.

in the mountains the cherry trees were in full bloom, and the farther he went, the lovelier the veils of mist became, until for him, whose rank so restricted travel that all this was new, the landscape became a source of wonder.

Did not we vow that we would neither of us be either before or after the other even in travelling the last journey of life? And can you find it in your heart to leave me now?

The Game of Go was one of the 4 Arts of China. It spread to all over Asia and was even mentioned in the Japanese novel, Tales of Genji. More than an ancient board game, the Game of Go is an analogy of life and emphasize balance, challenge, and fun. Not only does my name Kailin Gow has the word "Go" in it, but my philosophy on life of balance, challenge, and fun is similar to the Game. Thus, Kailin Gow's Go Girl TV Series, books, and overall brand reflects this philosophy as well. - Kailin Gow in interview about Kailin Gow's Go Girl Books and TV Series.

The bond between husband and wife is a strong one. Suppose the man had hunted her out and brought her back. The memory of her acts would still be there, and inevitably, sooner or later, it would be cause for rancor. When there are crises, incidents, a woman should try to overlook them, for better or for worse, and make the bond into something durable. The wounds will remain, with the woman and with the man, when there are crises such as I have described. It is very foolish for a woman to let a little dalliance upset her so much that she shows her resentment openly. He has his adventures--but if he has fond memories of their early days together, his and hers, she may be sure that she matters. A commotion means the end of everything. She should be quiet and generous, and when something comes up that quite properly arouses her resentment she should make it known by delicate hints. The man will feel guilty and with tactful guidance he will mend his ways. Too much lenience can make a woman seem charmingly docile and trusting, but it can also make her seem somewhat wanting in substance. We have had instances enough of boats abandoned to the winds and waves. It may be difficult when someone you are especially fond of, someone beautiful and charming, has been guilty of an indiscretion, but magnanimity produces wonders. They may not always work, but generosity and reasonableness and patience do on the whole seem best.

At a guess I see that you may indeed be he: the light silver dew brings to clothe in loveliness a twilight beauty flower.

The wood-carver can fashion whatever he will. Yet his products are but toys of the moment, to be glanced at in jest, not fashioned according to any precept or law. When times change, the carver too will change his style and make new trifles to hit the fancy of the passing day. But there is another kind of artist, who sets more soberly about his work, striving to give real beauty to the things which men actually use and to give to them the shape which tradition has ordained. This maker of real things must not for a moment be confused with the maker of idle toys.

Remember "the unmoored boat floats about.

Reality withing the depths of night has no more substance than the lucid dream.

Nothing can be well learned that is not agreeable to one’s natural taste.

When the young Prince turned three, the court observed the ceremony of the donning of his first trousers.

And among the leaves were white flowers with petals half-unfolded like the lips of people smiling at their own thoughts.

It is very unkind of you to feel this way. Any woman should properly yield, it seems to me, even a complete stranger, because that is the way of the world.... All I desire is solace from the flood of memories that overwhelms me.

We are not told of things that happened to specific people exactly as they happened; but the beginning is when there are good things and bad things, things that happen in this life which one never tires of seeing and hearing about, things which one cannot bear not to tell of and must pass on for all generations. If the storyteller wishes to speak well, then he chooses the good things; and if he wishes to hold the reader’s attention he chooses bad things, extraordinarily bad things. Good things and bad things alike, they are things of this world and no other. Writers in other countries approach the matter differently. Old stories in our own are different from new. There are differences in the degree of seriousness. But to dismiss them as lies is itself to depart from the truth. Even in the writ which the Buddha drew from his noble heart are parables, devices for pointing obliquely at the truth. To the ignorant they may seem to operate at cross purposes. The Greater Vehicle is full of them, but the general burden is always the same. The difference between enlightenment and confusion is of about the same order as the difference between the good and the bad in a romance. If one takes the generous view, then nothing is empty and useless.

Al poner demasiado empeño en olvidar, sólo recuerdo; ¿por qué, cuando uno trata de olvidar, no olvida?

New grass, you don't even know where to sprout and grow. How can I, a drop of dew, vanish away in the air leaving you alone?

The monotony stirs many bitter recollections

A woman who has nothing to recommend her is as rare as one who is perfect in every way.

The hanging gate, of something like trelliswork, was propped on a pole, and he could see that the house was tiny and flimsy. He felt a little sorry for the occupants of such a place--and then asked himself who in this world had a temporary shelter. [Anonymous, Kokinshuu 987: Where in all this world shall I call home? A temporary shelter is my home.] A hut, a jeweled pavilion, they were the same. A pleasantly green vine was climbing a board wall. The white flowers, he said to himself, had a rather self-satisfied look about them. 'I needs must ask the lady far yonder," he said, as if to himself. [Anonymous, Kokinshuu 1007: I needs must ask the lady far yonder What flower it is off there that blooms so white.] An attendant came up, bowing deeply. "The white flowers far off yonder are known as 'evening faces," he said. "A very human sort of name--and what a shabby place they have picked to bloom in." It was as the man said. The neighborhood was a poor one, chiefly of small houses. Some were leaning precariously, and there were "evening faces" at the sagging eaves. A hapless sort of flower. Pick one off for me, will you?" The man went inside the raised gate and broke off a flower. A pretty little girl in long, unlined yellow trousers of raw silk came out through a sliding door that seemed too good for the surroundings. Beckoning to the man, she handed him a heavily scented white fan. Put it on this. It isn't much of a fan, but then it isn't much of a flower either.

The dews that wet the tender grass, At the sun’s birth, too quickly pass, Nor e’er can hope to see it rise In full perfection to the skies.” Shiônagon, who now joined them, and heard the above distich, consoled the nun with the following:— “The dews will not so quickly pass, Nor shall depart before they see The full perfection of the grass, They loved so well in infancy.

There is a time for everything; and all people, but more especially women, should be constantly careful to watch circumstances, and not to air their accomplishments at a time when nobody cares for them. They should practise a sparing economy in displaying their learning and eloquence, and should even, if circumstances require, plead ignorance on subjects with which they are familiar.

As Genji mused about the transitory nature of life, intense feelings of weariness and distaste for the world overwhelmed him. How much longer must he go on living in it now that he had been left behind?

If it was all right to be a monster, weren’t my scar webs enough without the mask? Gods change, and so do men. Man has gone through periods of covering up his face, like the ladies in The Tale of Genji or veiled Arabian women, and at last we have arrived at the period of the real face.... It may be thought of as man’s victory over the gods; but at the same time it may be a sign of his allegiance to them. We never know what tomorrow will bring. Surprisingly, it is not altogether impossible that the future may see a period of rejecting the face again.

I should like to indulge in the pleasures of the seasons—the blossoms, the autumn leaves, the changing skies. People have long weighed the flowering woods in spring against the lovely hues of the autumn moors, and no one seems ever to have shown which one clearly deserves to be preferred. I hear that in China they say nothing equals the brocade of spring flowers, while in Yamato speech 41 we prefer the poignancy of autumn, but my eyes are seduced by each in turn, and I cannot distinguish favorites among the colors of their blossoms or the songs of their birds. I have in mind to fill a garden, however small, with enough flowering spring trees to convey the mood of the season, or to transplant autumn grasses there and, with them, the crickets whose song is so wasted in the fields, and then to give all this to a lady for her pleasure.

We cherish things, Japan has always known, precisely because they cannot last; it’s their frailty that adds sweetness to their beauty. In the central literary text of the land, The Tale of Genji, the word for “impermanence” is used more than a thousand times. Beauty, the foremost Jungian in Japan has observed, “is completed only if we accept the fact of death.” Autumn poses the question we all have to live with: How to hold on to the things we love even though we know that we and they are dying. How to see the world as it is, yet find light within that truth.

He felt her there beside him, just as she had always been on evenings like this when he had called for music, and when her touch on her instrument, or her least word to him, had been so much her own; except that he would have preferred even to this vivid dream her simple reality in the dark.

classic work like The Tale of Genji, as one recent translator has it, “The more intense the emotion, the more regular the meter.” As in the old-fashioned England in which I grew up—though more unforgivingly so—the individual’s job in public Japan is to keep his private concerns and feelings to himself and to present a surface that gives little away. That the relation of surface to depth is uncertain is part of the point; it offers a degree of protection and makes for absolute consistency. The fewer words spoken, the easier it is to believe you’re standing on common ground. One effect of this careful evenness—a maintenance of the larger harmony, whatever is happening within—is that to live in Japan, to walk through its complex nets of unstatedness, is to receive a rigorous training in attention. You learn to read the small print of life—to notice how the flowers placed in front of the tokonoma scroll have just been changed, in response to a shift in the season, or to register how your visitor is talking about everything except the husband who’s just run out on her. It’s what’s not expressed that sits at the heart of a haiku; a classic sumi-e brush-and-ink drawing leaves as much open space as possible at its center so that it becomes not a statement but a suggestion, an invitation to a collaboration. The reader or viewer is asked to complete a composition, and so the no-color surfaces make

Maybe Laura’s real problem came in admitting this: there was nothing new under the sun. To write a story would be, somehow deep down, to embrace her limits, to admit that, indeed, she would someday die—if not of a worm or a ceiling, then of something else. The very nature of a story admitted this reality. To be a writer was to say, yes, I am just another Murasaki, and it is quite possible that no one will remember my name.

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.

Gosenshū 1107 (Ōshikōchi no Mitsune): “Naturally the person who planted it has grown old ... but how tall the pine is now!

This is the paradoxical responsibility of the reader: to replenish the strangeness of the novel by making connections with the familiar.

voice. “Oh, it’s you.” The voice belonged to Mikamé, who seemed quite unconcerned about Ibuki’s disappointment. “What kind of a greeting is that? Listen, I found something in a bookstore near the hospital that I want you to see.” “More of your pornography?” “Wrong. It’s a reprint from an old edition of Clear Stream. Prewar. An essay by Mieko Toganō called ‘An Account of the Shrine in the Fields.’ Did you ever read it?” “Hmm, no. The Shrine in the Fields…isn’t that the place that comes up in The Tale of Genji in connection with the Rokujō lady?

Those who linger on and those all too swiftly gone live as dewdrops, all, and it is a foolish thing to set one's heart on their world.

Women are by nature blithely content to allow others to deceive them. You know full well these tales have only the slightest connection to reality, and yet you let your heart be moved by trivial words and get so caught up in the plots that you copy them out without giving a thought to the tangled mess your hair has become in this humid weather.

Her shock and dismay at his forward behaviour gave her an allure he found irresistibly attractive.

Perhaps this was indeed the way so remarkably accomplished a man was destined to meet his end,' he replied, 'because two or three years ago he began looking very downcast and melancholy, and I often warned him, despite my own want of sense, that a man who sees too far into life and thinks about things too deeply becomes too detached from them and to be attractive and only loses whatever luster he may have had, but he seemed merely to find my opinion shallow.

[F]ew people have never hurt anyone or been guilty of any serious lapse [...]

I who never knew what it was the broom tree meant now wonder to find the road to Sonohara led me so far from my way.

Sensitivity is a precious gift.

To put the point in a different way, the only truly original text is one that has never been read.

In haste to plunge into morning mists, You seem to have no heart for blossoms here.

possibly at the Kaitokudō, one of the most prominent of the new schools chartered by the government to provide “an appropriately practical Confucian education” to the children of the merchant and artisan classes.8 The curriculum would have included the Confucian canon—the Four Books (Lun yü [Analects] of Confucius, Da xue [The Great Learning], Zhong yong [The Doctrine of the Mean], and Mengzi [Mencius]) and the Five Classics (I jing [The Book of Changes], Shu jing [The Book of Documents], Shi jing [The Book of Songs], Li ji [The Book of Rites], and Chun qiu [Spring and Autumn Annals])—and Japanese classics, especially waka (thirty-one-syllable court poems), Ise monogatari (Tales of Ise, ca. 947), and The Tale of Genji.

There is hardly a word of truth in all this, as you know perfectly well,

There is hardly a word of truth in all this, as you know perfectly well.

And so, in the end, it is simply impossible to choose one woman over another. That is how it is with them: each is bound to be trying, one way or another.

His Retired Excellency had called in a powerful ascetic from the Kazuraki Mountains, and now he received the man and set him to working his prayers. The Great Rite and the chanting of scriptures went forward amid a tremendous din. He also sent his younger sons to look for others as well, wherever people said they might be found—more or less holy men of every kind, hidden deep in the hills and hardly known to the world at all—and he summoned these, too, until odious, repellent mountain ascetics began gathering to his residence in large numbers. The patient just suffered from vague fears and at times only sobbed.

She sent him out the message, “Perhaps I am getting worse day by day, but today, at any rate, I feel very ill. Do come in, then.” He was greatly moved and wondered what her condition could be, because this unaccustomed warmth was alarming.

Please teach her to understand others' feelings a little! Why should I go on courting her affection if she really cannot bear it?

The Tale of Genji, a literary masterpiece written by Murasaki Shikibu in the early eleventh century, cherries were portrayed as symbols of youth, love, romance and contentment,

The Heian court gave the world some of its finest early literature. For example, around 1004 the court lady Murasaki Shikibu wrote the world's first novel, Genji Monogatari (Tale of Prince Genji). Many of its thousand pages reveal a life of exquisite refinement.

Sve je besciljno na mome putu kroz oblake. Stid me je što me postojani mjesec uopće gleda.

Con respecto a quienes alcanzan una posición elevada sin tener derecho a ella por nacimiento, lo cierto es que, a pesar de su ranga, lo sociedad no experimenta del todo los mismos sentimientos hacia ellos, mientras que en el caso de quienes en el pasado tuvieron una posición encumbrada, pero en el presente carecen de medios y pasan por una mala época, decaen hasta que no les queda nada más que su orgullo y padecen un infortunio sin fin. Creo que estos dos grupos pertenecen al grado medio.

Purified in these mountain waters My own heart is unmoved by the sound That calls forth those tears that soak your sleeves “Have my own ears grown accustomed to the falling waters?