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...
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.
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
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.
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...
Passion can quickly slip to jealousy, or even hatred.
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.
When a man takes a mistress, he doesn't turn around and divorce his wife.
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.
I never seek to defeat the man I am fighting, he explained. I seek to defeat his confidence. A mind troubled by doubt cannot focus on the course to victory. Two men are equals - true equals - only wh...
I don't know when we'll see each other again or what the world will be like when we do. We may both have seen many horrible things. But I will think of you every time I need to be reminded that there...
When a stone is dropped into a pond, the water continues quivering even after the stone has sunk to the bottom.
The world was simply too cruel; how could I survive?
If you aren't the woman I think you are, then this isn't the world I thought it was.
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...
It's your duty to use what influence you have, unless you want to drift through life like a fish belly-up on the streamI wish I could believe that life really is something more than a stream that carr...
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.