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.

A mouse who wishes to fool the cat doesn't simply scamper out of its hole whenever it feels the slightest urge.

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 we viewed ourselves as pieces of clay that forever show the fingerprints of everyone who has touched them.

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

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.

In the instant before the door opened, I could almost sense my life expanding just like a river whose waters have begun to swell; for I had never before taken such a drastic step to change the course of my own future. I was like a child tiptoeing along a precipice overlooking the sea. And yet somehow I hadn't imagined a great wave might come and strike me there, and wash everything away.

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.