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

I fell into a sound sleep and dreamed that I was at a banquet back in Gion, talking with an elderly man who was explaining to me that his wife, whom he'd cared for deeply, wasn't really dead because the pleasure of their time together lived on inside him.

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.

Occasionally in life we come upon things we can't understand, because we have never seen anything similar.

We can never flee the misery that is within us.

How many times already had I encountered the painful lesson that although we may wish for the barb to be pulled from our flesh, it leaves a welt that doesn't heal?

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