Yet somehow the thing that startled me most, after a week or two had passed, was that I had in fact survived.

It's less a matter of looking the other way than of closing our eyes to what we can't stop from happening.

An en is a karmic bond lasting a lifetime. Nowadays many people seem to believe their lives are entirely a matter of choice; but in my day we viewed ourselves as pieces of clay that forever show the fingerprints of everyone who has touched them.

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

Every man has his destiny. But who needs to go to a fortune-teller to find it? Do I go to a chef to find out if I'm hungry?

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.

Can't you see? Every step I have taken, since I was that child on the bridge, has been to bring myself closer to you.