A mind troubled by doubt cannot focus on the course of victory.

If you keep your destiny in mind, every moment in life becomes an opportunity for moving closer to it.

I went back to those graves not long afterward and found as I stood there that sadness was a very heavy thing. My body weighed twice what it had only a moment earlier, as if those graves were pulling me down toward them.

As an American man of the 1990s writing about a Japanese woman of the 1930s, I needed to cross three cultural divides - man to woman, American to Japanese, and present to past.

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

I don't like things held up before me that I cannot have.

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.