"Finally the homeless eel marked its territory, I suppose, and the Doctor lay heavily upon me, moist with sweat. "
- Arthur Golden
"Oh I'm sure you're right," Auntie said. "Probably she's just as you say. But she looks to me like a very clever girl, and adaptable; you can see that from the shape of her ears."
"When we fight upstream against a rocky undercurrent, every foothold takes on a kind of urgency."
"We human beings are only a part of something very much larger. When we walk along, we may crush a beetle or simply cause a change in the air so that a fly ends up where it might never have gone otherw..."
"If he couldn't forgive you for what you'd done, it was clear to me he was never truly your destiny."
"But, Mameha-san, I don’t want kindness!”“Don’t you? I thought we all wanted kindness. Perhaps what you mean is that you want something more than kindness. And that is something you’re in no position t..."
"that droplet of moisture that had slipped from me like a tear seemed almost to tell the story of my life. It fell through empty space, with no control whatsoever over its destiny; rolled along a path ..."
"I knew even then that she was right. An en is a karmic bond lasting a lifetime. Nowadays many people seem to believe their lives are entirely a matter of choice; but in my day we viewed ourselves as p..."
"I'm not sure this will make sense to you but I felt as though I'd turned around to look in a different direction so that I no longer faced backward toward the past but forward toward the future. And n..."
"If we rub a fabric too often, it will quickly grow threadbare; and Nobu’s words had rasped against me so much, I could no longer maintain that finely lacquered surface Mameha had always counseled me t..."