If you aren't the woman I think you are, then this isn't the world I thought it was.

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.

Memoirs give the knowledge about the author and his environment. They are different from biography. Memoirs do not get ahead, and the man who writes a biography looks at his future like at a very simple thing.

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

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.

of course the pace of change never slows, even when we've convinced ourselves it will.

I began to feel that all the people I'd ever known who had died or left me had not in fact gone away, but continued to live on inside me just as this man's wife lived on inside him.