And I can't complain. After all, only women are able really to love.

I suppose even a woman's hatred is a kind of love.

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.

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

The labor into which a heart has poured its whole love--where will it have its say, to excite and inspire, and when?

The woman was silent, her eyes on the floor. Shimamura had come to a point where he knew he was only parading his masculine shamelessness, and yet it seemed likely enough that the woman was familiar with the failing and need not be shocked by it. He looked at her. Perhaps it was the rich lashes of the downcast eyes that made her face seem warm and sensuous. She shook her head very slightly, and again a faint blush spread over her face.

But a haiku by Buson came into his mind: 'I try to forget this senile love; a chilly autumn shower.' The gloom only grew denser.