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.

I tried to continue, but somehow my throat made up its mind to swallow – though I can’t think what I was swallowing, unless it was a little knot of emotion I pushed back down because there was no room in my face for any more.

The prettiest of them all is a girl who is pretty on the inside.

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.

We must use whatever methods we can to understand the movement of the universe around us and time our actions so that we are not fighting the currents, but moving with them.

But what I could see out of the corner of my eye made me think of two lovely bundles of silk floating along a stream. In a moment they were hovering on the walkway in front of me, where they sank down and smoothed their kimono across their knees.

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