The dead made this world. We didn't make it. They made the poetry and the songs and the customs.

When a father, absent during the day, returns home at six, his children receive only his temperament, not his teaching.

We know that the adult in a certain sense has an attitude toward life exactly opposite to the attitude of commercials. Commercials say, 'Your longing for 3.2 beer is very important. Your longing for skin that doesn't have any wrinkles in it, that's very, very, very important.' The adult says, 'No, I've got wrinkles, so what?'

The ancestors are very much invested in the children, because the children are the ones who are going to continue the world that the ancestors made.

We spend our life until we’re twenty deciding what parts of ourself to put into the bag, and we spend the rest of our lives trying to get them out again.

What you feel in Japanese poetry is always entirely longing.

The beginning of love is a horror of emptiness.