Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Finally the homeless eel marked its territory, I suppose, and the Doctor lay heavily upon me, moist with sweat.
Some people have difficulty telling the difference between something great and something they've simply heard of.
The heart dies a slow death, shedding each hope like leaves until one day there are none. No hopes. Nothing remains.
Can't you see? Every step I have taken, since I was that child on the bridge, has been to bring myself closer to you.
Sometimes we get through adversity only by imagining what the world might be like if our dreams should ever come true.
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.
After all, when a stone is dropped into a pond, the water continues quivering even after the stone has sunk to the bottom.
All at once I felt so vain, like a girl posturing for the crowds as she walks along, only to discover the street is empty.
Every man has his destiny. But who needs to go to a fortune-teller to find it? Do I go to a chef to find out if I'm hungry?
This is why dreams can be such dangerous things: they smolder on like a fire does, and sometimes they consume us completely.
My mother once told me I was like water. Water can carve its way even through stone. And when trapped, water makes a new path.
Hopes are like hair ornaments. Girls want to wear too many of them. When they become old women they look silly wearing even one.
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.
If Mother and Mameha couldn't come to an agreement, I would remain a maid all my life just as surely as a turtle remains a turtle
And when I raised myself to look at the man who'd spoken, I had a feeling of leaving my misery behind me there on the stone wall.
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
By the time we arrived, as evening was approaching, I felt as sore as a rock must feel when the waterfall has pounded on it all day long.
Adversity is like a strong wind. It tears away from us all but the things that cannot be torn, so that we see ourselves as we really are.
Those of us with water in our personalities don't pick where we'll flow to. All we can do is flow where the landscape of our lives carries us
What I really wanted to know, though, was what it was like to be a geisha? Where do you sleep? What do you eat? How do you have your hair done?
If you have experienced an evening more exciting than any in your life, you're sad to see it end; and yet you still feel grateful that it happened.
Seeing him again after so long awakened something inside me. I was surprised to find myself feeling sad rather than joyful, as I would have imagined.
We lead our lives like water flowing down a hill, going more or less in one direction until we splash into something that forces us to find a new course.
You know, the men go to tea houses with the expectation that they will have a nice quiet evening and not read about it the next morning in the newspaper.
Was life nothing more than a storm that constantly washed away what had been there only a moment before, and left behind something barren and unrecognizable?
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.
I had to wonder if men were so blinded by beauty that they would feel privileged to live their lives with an actual demon, so long as it was a beautiful demon.
This time all the historical details and things were right. But I'd written it again in third person, and people found it dry. I decided to throw that one away.
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.
The swan who goes on living in its parents' tree will die; this is why those who are beautiful and talented bear the burden of finding their own way in the world.
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.
How many times already had I encountered the painful lesson that although we may wish for the barb to be pulled from our flesh, it leaves a welt that doesn't heal?
I was thanking him for...well, for something I'm not sure I can explain even now. For showing me that something besides cruelty could be found in the world, I suppose.
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.
As an American man of the 1990s writing about a Japanese woman of the 1930s, I needed to cross three cultural divides - man to woman, American to Japanese, and present to past.
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.
If those sorts of moments would be the only pleasure life offered me, I'd be better off shutting out that one brilliant source of light to let my eyes begin to adjust to the darkness.
Anyone can have a good day. The question is what do you do on a bad day. That's when you're being tested. In a very tangible sense, a bad day shows your innermost essence more than a good day.
And then I became aware of all the magnificent silk wrapped around my body, and had the feeling I might drown in beauty. At that moment, beauty itself struck me as a kind of painful melancholy.
A tree may look as beautiful as ever; but when you notice the insects infesting it, and the tips of the branches that are brown from disease, even the trunk seems to lose some of its magnificence.
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.
This character's entirely invented, and the woman that I interviewed wouldn't recognize herself, or really anything about herself, in this book, which she hasn't read, because she doesn't read English.
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 simple thing.
Now I know that our world is no more permanent than a wave rising on the ocean. Whatever our struggles and triumphs, however we may suffer them, all too soon they bleed into a wash, just like watery ink on paper.
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 their daughters.
I went back to those graves not long afterward and found as I stood there that sadness was a very heavy thing. My body weighed twice what it had only a moment earlier, as if those graves were pulling me down toward them.
Waiting patiently doesn't suit you. I can see you have a great deal of water in your personality. Water never waits. It changes shape and flows around things, and finds the secret paths no one else has thought about. [Mameha]
I tried to continue, but somehow my throat made up its mind to swallow – though I can’t think what I was swallowing, unless it was a little knot of emotion I pushed back down because there was no room in my face for any more.
Adversity is like a strong wind. I don't mean just that it holds us back from places we might otherwise go. It also tears away from us all but the things that cannot be torn, so that afterward we see ourselves as we really are.
We all know that a winter scene, though it may be covered over one day, with even the trees dressed in shawls of snow, will be unrecognizable the following spring. Yet I never imagined such a thing could occur within our very selves.