Sometimes we get through adversity only by imagining what the world might be like if our dreams should ever come true.

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...

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.

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...

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...

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...

When a stone is dropped into a pond, the water continues quivering even after the stone has sunk to the bottom.

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,...

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.

When a man takes a mistress, he doesn’t turn around and divorce his wife.

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...

…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...

Once when I was a little child of six or so, I watched a spider spinning its web in a corner of the house. Before the spider had even finished its job, a mosquito flew...

Hopes are like hair ornaments. Girls want to wear too many of them. When they become old women they look silly wearing even one.

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.

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...

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...

It struck me that we-that moth and I-were two opposite extremes. My existence was as unstable as a stream, changing in everyway; but the moth was like a piece of stone, changing not at all....

Watch for the thing that will show itself to you. Because that thing, when you find it, will be your future.

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...

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.

Yet somehow the thing that startled me most, after a week or two had passed, was that I had in fact survived.

At that moment, beauty itself struck me as a kind of painful melancholy.

Of course, a sign doesn’t mean anything unless you know how to interpret it.

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 you want to break a board, cracking it in the middle is only the first step. Success comes when you bounce up and down with all your might until the board snaps in half

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...

A memoir provides a record not so much of the memoirist as of the memoirist’s world.

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...

Grief is a most peculiar thing; we’re so helpless in the face of it. It’s like a window that will simply open of its own accord. The room grows cold, and we can do nothing...

I will think of you every time I need to be reminded that there is beauty and goodness in the world.

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.

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

It’s less a matter of looking the other way than of closing our eyes to what we can’t stop from happening.

If he couldn’t forgive you for what you’d done, it was clear to me he was never truly your destiny.

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...

Sometimes,” he sighed, “I think the things I remember are more real than the things I see.

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...

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.

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.

Friendship is a precious thing, Sayuri. One mustn’t throw it away.

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...

Finally the homeless eel marked its territory, I suppose, and the Doctor lay heavily upon me, moist with sweat.

The heart dies a slow death, shedding each hope like leaves until one day there are none. No hopes. Nothing remains.

We human beings are only a part of something very much larger. When we walk along, we may crush a beetle or simply cause a change in the air so that a fly ends up...

After all, when a stone is dropped into a pond, the water continues quivering even after the stone has sunk to the bottom.

A woman who acts like a fool is a fool.

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.

Flowers that grow where old ones have withered serve to remind us that death will one day come to us all.

When we fight upstream against a rocky undercurrent, every foothold takes on a kind of urgency.