Sei Shōnagon quotes

Sei Shōnagon was a Japanese author and court lady best known for writing The Pillow Book. Her witty and observant essays provide a unique insight into court life during the Heian period. She is remembered as one of the greatest writers of classical Japanese literature. Here are 7 of her quotes:

One is telling a story about old times when someone breaks in with a little detail that he happens to know, implying that one's own version is inaccurate - disgusting behavior!

Sei Shōnagon

In life there are two things which are dependable. The pleasures of the flesh and the pleasures of literature.

Sei Shōnagon

Pleasing things: finding a large number of tales that one has not read before. Or acquiring the second volume of a tale whose first volume one has enjoyed. But often it is a disappointment.

Sei Shōnagon

Splendid Things Chinese brocade. A sword with a decorated scabbard. The grain of the wood in a Buddhist statue. Long flowering branches of beautifully coloured wistaria entwined about a pine tree.

Sei Shōnagon

Things That Lose by Being Painted Pinks, cherry blossoms, yellow roses. Men or women who are praised in romances as being beautiful.Things That Gain by Being Painted Pines. Autumn fields. Mountain villages and paths. Cranes and deer. A very cold winter scene; an unspeakably hot summer scene.

Sei Shōnagon

Sei Shonagon feels modern, almost a proto-feminist in such a paternalistic age that women at court stayed, for the most part, silent and still and available indoors all their lives. She said much, and she said two electrifying things from the still darkness of her domestic prisons. She said them of course very much in her own way, but she said there were two things in life that were absolutely essential, and life would be unbearable without them: the sensuous body and literature. My crude summation would be sex and text. Both have the X factor. She said them with longing and her longing stayed with me.

Sei Shōnagon