A Quote by Junichiro Tanizaki

Find beauty not only in the thing itself but in the pattern of the shadows, the light and dark which that thing provides. — © Junichiro Tanizaki
Find beauty not only in the thing itself but in the pattern of the shadows, the light and dark which that thing provides.
We Orientals find beauty not only in the thing itself but in the pattern of the shadows, the light and darkness which that thing provides.
Very great charm of shadow and light is to be found in the faces of those who sit in the doors of dark houses. The eye of the spectator sees that part of the face which is in shadow lost in the darkness of the house, and that part of the face which is lit draws its brilliancy from the splendour of the sky. From this intensification of light and shade the face gains greatly in relief and beauty by showing the subtlest shadows in the light part and the subtlest lights in the dark part.
Every time you do a good deed you shine the light a little farther into the dark. And the thing is, when you're gone that light is going to keep shining on, pushing the shadows back.
I try to mimic the pattern of memory and of thinking and the randomness of life. It's like a journey. That is the main thing about the beauty of life; that you don't cram. And not only beauty, but also the fact that there is never a concrete thing in life.
The books or the music in which we thought the beauty was located will betray us if we trust to them; it was not in them, it only came through them,and what came through them was longing. These things—the beauty, the memory of our own past—are good images of what we really desire; but if they are mistaken for the thing itself they turn into dumb idols,breaking the hearts of their worshippers. For they are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited.
That was the thing: Once, the difference between light and dark had been basic. One was good, one bad. Suddenly, though, things weren’t so clear. The dark was still a mystery, something hidden, something to be scared of, but I’d come to fear the light, too. It was where everything was revealed, or seemed to be. Eyes closed, I saw only the blackness, reminding me of this one thing, the most deep of my secrets; eyes open, there was only the world that didn’t know it, bright, inescapable, and somehow, still there.
The thing about shadows is that they're not all darkness. You need to have light to have shadows. So just look for it.
Life itself is but the shadow of death, and souls departed but the shadows of the living: All things fall under this name. The Sun itself is but the dark simulacrum, and the light but the shadow of God.
Many places in the Bronx seem hidden in shadows, just as the Bronx itself is in Manhattan's shadow. And dark stories develop best in dark shadows.
Sometimes, photographs live in our hearts as unborn ghosts and we survive not because their shadows find permanence there, but because that thing that is larger than us, larger than the things we can point to, remember and claim, escorts us from dark into light.
My cameraman and I devised a method, which we started using from my second film, which applies mainly to day scenes shot in the studio, where we used bounced light instead of direct light. We agreed with this thing of four or five shadows following the actors is dreadful.
Every life has dark tracts and long stretches of somber tint, and no representation is true to fact which dips its pencil only in light, and flings no shadows on the canvas.
You know... the wonderful thing about Dark Shadows, the thing about going and looking back at it. It was so sucsessful at creating its own world.
The reason why so many of my photographs in the book were taken in stairwells and corridors was that that was the only bit of spare space available and, in some cases, the only place where there was enough light to see anything. Even then, it was often so dark that I couldn't tell which gender my subject was (not that I particularly cared) and too dark, before the era of autofocus, to focus. I had to find a light (or carry a torch) and pre-focus.
The thing is to understand myself: the thing is to find a truth which is true for me, to find the idea for which I can live and die. That is what I now recognize as the most important thing.
Because one does not want to be disturbed, to be made uncertain, he establishes a pattern of conduct, of thought, a pattern of relationships to man. He then becomes a slave to the pattern and takes the pattern to be the real thing.
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