Hopes are like hair ornaments. Girls want to wear too many of them. When they become old women they look silly wearing even one.
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, and not merely as we m...
Couldn't the wrong sort of living turn anyone mean? I remembered very well that one day back in Yoroido, a boy pushed me into a thorn bush near the pond. By the time I clawed my way out I was mad enough to bite through wood. If a few minutes of suffe...
I will think of you every time I need to be reminded that there is beauty and goodness in the world.
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.
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
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 when they both have equal confidence.
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.
Flowers that grow where old ones have withered serve to remind us that death will one day come to us all.
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.
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.
The heart dies a slow death, shedding each hope like leaves until one day there are none. No hopes. Nothing remains.
I cannot tell you what it is that guides us in this life; but for me, I fell toward the Chairman just as a stone must fall toward the earth. When I cut my lip and met Mr. Tanaka, when my mother died and I was cruelly sold, it was all like a stream th...
If he couldn't forgive you for what you'd done, it was clear to me he was never truly your destiny.
…ora so che il nostro mondo è tanto instabile quanto un'onda che si innalza in mezzo all'oceano. Quali che siano stati i nostri conflitti e i nostri trionfi, per quanto indelebile sia il segno che questi abbiano potuto lasciare su di noi, finiscon...
But, Mameha-san, I don’t want kindness!” “Don’t you? I thought we all wanted kindness. Perhaps what you mean is that you want something more than kindness. And that is something you’re in no position to ask.
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 of silk; and somehow came to rest there on the tee...
When we fight upstream against a rocky undercurrent, every foothold takes on a kind of urgency.
