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.

You seemed so desperate, like you might drown if someone didn't save you.

If you have experienced an evening more exciting than any in your life, you're sad to see it end; and yet you still feel grateful that it happened.

At the temple there is a poem called "Loss" carved into the stone. It has three words, but the poet has scratched them out. You cannot read loss, only feel it.

Adversity is like a strong wind. I don't mean just that it holds us back from places we might otherwise go. It also tears away from us all but the things that cannot be torn, so that afterward we see ourselves as we really are.

I worried she might spend an afternoon chatting with me about the sights and then wish me best of luck.

At that moment, beauty itself struck me as a kind of painful melancholy.