I knew even then that she was right. An en is a karmic bond lasting a lifetime. Nowadays many people seem to believe their lives are entirely a matter of choice; but in my day we viewed ourselves as p...
Perhaps it seems odd that a casual meeting on the street could have brought about such change. But sometimes life is like that isn't it
Oh I'm sure you're right, Auntie said. Probably she's just as you say. But she looks to me like a very clever girl, and adaptable; you can see that from the shape of her ears.
And yet if I drew my thoughts back from him, what life would I have? I would be like a dancer who had practiced since childhood for a performance she would never give.
I'm not sure this will make sense to you but I felt as though I'd turned around to look in a different direction so that I no longer faced backward toward the past but forward toward the future. And n...
For a flicker of a moment I imagined a world completely different from the one I'd always known, a world in which I was treated with fairness, even kindness-- a world in which fathers didn't sell thei...
At that moment, beauty itself struck me as a kind of painful melancholy.
From this experience, I understood the danger of focusing only on what isn't there. What if I came to the end of my life and realized that I'd spent every day watching for a man who would never come t...
My tears simply broke through the fragile wallthat had held them, and with a terrible feeling of shame, I laid my head upon the table and let them drain out of me.
That droplet of moisture that had slipped from me like a tear seemed almost to tell the story of my life. It fell through empty space, with no control whatsoever over its destiny; rolled along a path...
When I said these words, all the heat in my body seemed to rise to my face. I felt I might float up into the air, just like a piece of ash from a fire.
The world was simply too cruel; how could I survive?
Passion can quickly slip to jealousy, or even hatred.
Sometimes we get through adversity only by imagining what the world might be like if our dreams should ever come true.
When a stone is dropped into a pond, the water continues quivering even after the stone has sunk to the bottom.
It was an evening of torment, and I remember only one other thing about it. At some point after everyone was asleep, I wandered away from the inn in a daze and ended up on the sea cliffs, staring out...
If we rub a fabric too often, it will quickly grow threadbare; and Nobu’s words had rasped against me so much, I could no longer maintain that finely lacquered surface Mameha had always counseled me t...
If you aren't the woman I think you are, then this isn't the world I thought it was.
Nothing in life is ever as simple as we imagine.
Even now that he is gone I have him still, in the richness of my memories. I've lived my life again just telling it to you.
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