Waiting patiently doesn't suit you. 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. [Mameha]

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 sell their daughters.

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 suffering could make me so angry, what would years of it do? Even stone can be worn down with enough rain.

A tree may look as beautiful as ever; but when you notice the insects infesting it, and the tips of the branches that are brown from disease, even the trunk seems to lose some of its magnificence.

I don't think any of us can speak frankly about pain until we are no longer enduring it.

Here again, I saw life in all its noisy excitement passing me by.

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