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

We lead our lives like water flowing down a hill, going more or less in one direction until we splash into something that forces us to find a new course.

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

Couldn't the wrong sort of living turn anyone mean? I remembered very well that one day back in Yoroido, a boy pushed me into a thorn bush near the pond. By the time I clawed my way out I was mad enough to bite through wood. If a few minutes of suffering could make me so angry, what would years of it do? Even stone can be worn down with enough rain.

Those of us with water in our personalities don't pick where we'll flow to. All we can do is flow where the landscape of our lives carries us

For a flicker of a moment I imagined a world completely different from the one I'd always known, a world in which I was treated with fairness, even kindness-- a world in which fathers didn't sell their daughters.

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