Memoirs give the knowledge about the author and his environment. They are different from biography. Memoirs do not get ahead, and the man who writes a biography looks at his future like at a very simple thing.

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.

You know, the men go to tea houses with the expectation that they will have a nice quiet evening and not read about it the next morning in the newspaper.

After all, when a stone is dropped into a pond, the water continues quivering even after the stone has sunk to the bottom.

Sometimes we get through adversity only by imagining what the world might be like if our dreams should ever come true.

I fell into a sound sleep and dreamed that I was at a banquet back in Gion, talking with an elderly man who was explaining to me that his wife, whom he'd cared for deeply, wasn't really dead because the pleasure of their time together lived on inside him.

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