Junichiro Tanizaki Quotes

Were it not for shadows, there would be no beauty.

The older we get the more we seem to think that everything was better in the past.

For a woman who lived in the dark it was enough if she had a faint, white face -a full body was unnecessary.

Each worm to his taste;
some prefer to eat nettles.

We delight in the mere sight of the delicate glow of fading rays clinging to the surface of a dusky wall, there to live out what little life remains to them.

Yet for better or worse we love things that bear the marks of grime, soot, and weather, and we love the colors and the sheen that call to mind the past that made them.

There are those who say that when civilization progresses a bit further transportation facilities will move into the skies and under the ground, and that our streets will again be quiet, but I know perfectly well that when that day comes some new device for torturing the old will be invented.

Whenever I sit with a bowl of soup before me, listening to the murmur that penetrates like the distant song of an insect, lost in contemplation of the flavours to come, I feel as if I were being drawn into a trance.

Find beauty not only in the thing itself but in the pattern of the shadows, the light and dark which that thing provides.

And isn’t it better really to leave things only hinted at?