Put your soul in the palm of my hand for me to look at, like a crystal jewel. I'll sketch it in words.

A child walked by, rolling a metal hoop that made a sound of autumn.

A poetess who had died young of cancer had said in one of her poems that for her, on sleepless nights, 'the night offers toads and black dogs and corpses of the drowned.

Our language is primarily for expressing human goodness and beauty.

In the depths of the mirror the evening landscape moved by, the mirror and the reflected figures like motion pictures superimposed one on the other. The figures and the background were unrelated, and yet the figures, transparent and intangible, and the background, dim in the gathering darkness, melted into a sort of symbolic world not of this world. Particularly when a light out in the mountains shone in the center of the girl's face, Shimamura felt his chest rise at the inexpressible beauty of it.

The snow on the distant mountains was soft and creamy, as if veiled in a faint smoke.

They were words that came out of nothing, but they seemed to him somehow significant. He muttered them over again.