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 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.

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

Occasionally in life we come upon things we can't understand, because we have never seen anything similar.

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.

He was like a song I'd heard once in fragments but had been singing in my mind ever since.