A memoir provides a record not so much of the memoirist as of the memoirist's world.
Whatever our struggles and triumphs, however we may suffer them, all too soon they bleed into a wash, just like watery ink on paper.
Some people have difficulty telling the difference between something great and something they've simply heard of.
Of course, a sign doesn't mean anything unless you know how to interpret it.
If you keep your destiny in mind, every moment in life becomes an opportunity for moving closer to it.
Finally the homeless eel marked its territory, I suppose, and the Doctor lay heavily upon me, moist with sweat.
You cannot say to the sun, or to the rain, To a man, geisha can only be half a wife. We are the wives of nightfall. And yet, to learn kindness after so much unkindness, to understand that a little g...
When I was in the street throwing a beanbag with the other children and Mr. Tanaka happened to stroll out of the seafood company, I always stopped what I was doing to watch him.I lay there on that sli...
What an unbearable sorrow it would be, to realized I'd never really tasted to things I'd eaten, or seen the places I'd been. What life would I have? I would be like the dancer who had practiced since...
The corridor couldn't have smelled more strongly of fish guts if we had actually been inside a fish.
Sadness was a very heavy thing. My body weighed twice what it had only a moment earlier.
Neither you nor I can know your destiny. You may never know it! Destiny isn't always like a party at the end of the evening. Sometimes it's nothing more than struggling through life from day to day.
I will think of you every time I need to be reminded that there is beauty and goodness in the world.
I wasn’t thanking him for the coin, or even for the trouble he’d taken in stopping to help me. I was thanking him for... well,for something I’m not sure I can explain even now. For showing me that som...
Since the day I’d left Yoroido, I’d done nothing but worry that every turn of life’s wheel would bring yet another obstacle into my path; and of course, it was the worrying and the struggle that had a...
My existence was as unstable as a stream, changing in every way; but the moth was like a piece of stone, changing not at all.
It was what we Japanese called the onion life, peeling away a layer at a time and crying all the while.
I'd done nothing but worry that every turn of life's wheel would bring yet another obstacle into my path; and of course, it was the worrying and the struggle that had always made life so vividly real...
I stumbled out into the courtyard to try to flee my misery, but of course we can never flee the misery that is within us.
Here's the thing: this eel spends its entire life trying to find a home, and what do you think women have inside them? Caves, where the eels like to live...when they find a cave they like, the wriggle...