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.

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

Flowers that grow where old ones have withered serve to remind us that death will one day come to us all.

Well, a peach has a lovely taste and so does a mushroom, but you can't put the two together.

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.

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

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