The corridor couldn't have smelled more strongly of fish guts if we had actually been inside a fish.

Sometimes we get through adversity only by imagining what the world might be like if our dreams should ever come true.

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

It's less a matter of looking the other way than of closing our eyes to what we can't stop from happening.

An en is a karmic bond lasting a lifetime. Nowadays many people seem to believe their lives are entirely a matter of choice; but in my day we viewed ourselves as pieces of clay that forever show the fingerprints of everyone who has touched them.

I don't like things held up before me that I cannot have.

I cannot tell you what it is that guides us in this life; but for me, I fell toward the Chairman just as a stone must fall toward the earth. When I cut my lip and met Mr. Tanaka, when my mother died and I was cruelly sold, it was all like a stream that falls over rocky cliffs before it can reach the ocean. Even now that he is gone I have him still, in the richness of my memories.