If Mother and Mameha couldn't come to an agreement, I would remain a maid all my life just as surely as a turtle remains a turtle

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.

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.

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

We all know that a winter scene, though it may be covered over one day, with even the trees dressed in shawls of snow, will be unrecognizable the following spring. Yet I never imagined such a thing could occur within our very selves.

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

Water is powerful. It can wash away earth, put out fire, and even destroy iron.