I've lived my life again just telling it to you.

The prettiest of them all is a girl who is pretty on the inside.

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 - the tiny hole through the roof or the bottom of a box. There's no doubt it's the most versatile of the five elements. It can wash away earth; it can put out fire, it can wear a piece of metal down and sweep it away. Even wood, which is its natural complement, can't survive without being nurtured by water And yet, you haven't drawn on those strengths in living your life, have you?

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.

Nothing in life is ever as simple as we imagine.

It was what we Japanese called the onion life, peeling away a layer at a time and crying all the while.

I fell into a sound sleep and dreamed that I was at a banquet back in Gion, talking with an elderly man who was explaining to me that his wife, whom he'd cared for deeply, wasn't really dead because the pleasure of their time together lived on inside him.