Grief is a most peculiar thing; we're so helpless in the face of it.
At the temple there is a poem called Loss carved into the stone. It has three words, but the poet has scratched them out. You cannot read loss, only feel it.
And suddenly everything around me seemed to grow quiet, as if he were the wind that blew and I were just a cloud carried upon it.
All my hard work in overhearing it was it was about as rewarding to me as a man who lugs a chest up the hill only to learn that its full of rocks.
A mind troubled by doubt cannot focus on the course of victory.
Yet somehow the thing that startled me most, after a week or two had passed, was that I had in fact survived.
We must use whatever methods we can to understand the movement of the universe around us and time our actions so that we are not fighting the currents, but moving with them.
We human beings have a remarkable way of growing accustomed to things.
Watch for the thing that will show itself to you. Because that thing, when you find it, will be your future.
This is why dreams can be such dangerous things: they smolder on like a fire does, and sometimes consume us completely.
She paints her face to hide her face. Her eyes are deep water. It is not for Geisha to want. It is not for geisha to feel. Geisha is an artist of the floating world. She dances, she sings. She enterta...
Memoirs give the knowledge about the author and his environment. They are different from biography. Memoirs do not get ahead, and the man who writes a biography looks at his future like at a very simp...
If a few minutes of suffering could make me so angry, what would years of it do? Even a stone can be worn down with enough rain.
I've often observed that men and women who were young children during these years [of defeat in war] have a certain seriousness about them; there was too little laughter in their childhoods.
I won't say I'd never wondered what might happen if she should die; I did wonder about it, in the same way I wondered what might happen if our house were swallowed up in an earthquake. There could har...
I watched him walk away with sickness in my heart—though it was a pleasing kind of sickness, if such a thing exists. I mean to say that if you have experienced an evening more exciting than any in you...
I learned that year that nothing is so unpredictable as who will survive a war and who won't.
I could no more have stopped myself from feeling that sadness than you could stop yourself from smelling an apple that has been cut open on the table before you.
I began to feel that all the people I'd ever known who had died or left me had not in fact gone away, but continued to live on inside me just as this man's wife lived on inside him.
His face was very heavily creased, and into each crease he had tucked some worry or other, so that it wasn't really his face any longer, but more like a tree that had nests of birds in all of the bran...