Here's the thing: this eel spends its entire life trying to find a home, and what do you think women have inside them? Caves, where the eels like to live...when they find a cave they like, the wriggle around inside it for a while to be sure that...well, to be sure it's a nice cave, I suppose. And when they've made up their minds that it's comfortable, they mark the cave as their territory...by spitting.

When we fight upstream against a rocky undercurrent, every foothold takes on a kind of urgency.

It was what we Japanese called the onion life, peeling away a layer at a time and crying all the while.

Here's the thing: this eel spends its entire life trying to find a home, and what do you think women have inside them? Caves, where the eels like to live...when they find a cave they like, the wriggle around inside it for a while to be sure that...well, to be sure it's a nice cave, I suppose. And when they've made up their minds that it's comfortable, they mark the cave as their territory...by spitting.

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

Water is powerful. It can wash away earth, put out fire, and even destroy iron.

We can never flee the misery that is within us.