The heart of mine is only one, it cannot be known by anybody but myself.

For a woman who lived in the dark it was enough if she had a faint, white face -a full body was unnecessary.

The ancients waited for cherry blossoms, grieved when they were gone, and lamented their passing in countless poems. How very ordinary the poems had seemed to Sachiko when she read them as a girl, but now she knew, as well as one could know, that grieving over fallen cherry blossoms was more than a fad or convention.

The heart of mine is only one, it cannot be known by anybody but myself.

Find beauty not only in the thing itself but in the pattern of the shadows, the light and dark which that thing provides.

The older we get the more we seem to think that everything was better in the past.

Were it not for shadows, there would be no beauty.