We can never flee the misery that is within us.

Waiting patiently doesn't suit you. I can see you have a great deal of water in your personality. Water never waits. It changes shape and flows around things, and finds the secret paths no one else has thought about. [Mameha]

A mouse who wishes to fool the cat doesn't simply scamper out of its hole whenever it feels the slightest urge.

Of course, a sign doesn't mean anything unless you know how to interpret it.

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.

This is why dreams can be such dangerous things: they smolder on like a fire does, and sometimes they consume us completely.

It was what we Japanese called the onion life, peeling away a layer at a time and crying all the while.