What is one person's diversion may be another's supreme test.

Kindness is stronger than iron bars.

I had a desire to see something besides my own shores, if only to be content to return to them someday. If I wish to live in my native land and love her, it should not be out of ignorance.

Hope is a straw hat hanging beside a window covered with frost.

Now I felt the long-forgotten urgency of lovemaking, when it seems one's human selves leave, to be replaced by hungry beasts bolting their food. Gone are the civilized beings who talk of manners and journeys and letters; in their places are two bodies straining to give birth to a burst of inhuman pleasure followed by a great, floating nothingness. An explosion of life followed by death - in this we live, and in this we foreshadow our own sweet deaths.

When he comes into a room, you give a little gasp, deep inside, far inside,' someone once said when trying to describe what it meant to love.

Yet we always envy others, comparing our shadows to their sunlit sides.