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.

A tree may look as beautiful as ever; but when you notice the insects infesting it, and the tips of the branches that are brown from disease, even the trunk seems to lose some of its magnificence.

The heart dies a slow death, shedding each hope like leaves until one day there are none. No hopes. Nothing remains.

Sometimes," he sighed, "I think the things I remember are more real than the things I see.

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

A mind troubled by doubt cannot focus on the course of victory.

As an American man of the 1990s writing about a Japanese woman of the 1930s, I needed to cross three cultural divides - man to woman, American to Japanese, and present to past.