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?

A memoir provides a record not so much of the memoirist as of the memoirist's world.

Finally the homeless eel marked its territory, I suppose, and the Doctor lay heavily upon me, moist with sweat.

And when I raised myself to look at the man who'd spoken, I had a feeling of leaving my misery behind me there on the stone wall.

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.

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

I tried to continue, but somehow my throat made up its mind to swallow – though I can’t think what I was swallowing, unless it was a little knot of emotion I pushed back down because there was no room in my face for any more.