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.

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

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

I didn't say to act dead. I said act helpless.

We none of us find as much kindness in this world as we should.

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

Geisha is always called beautiful even if she is not.