If those sorts of moments would be the only pleasure life offered me, I’d be better off shutting out that one brilliant source of light to let my eyes begin to adjust to the darkness.
At that moment, beauty itself struck me as a kind of painful melancholy.
Geisha is always called beautiful even if she is not.
I tried to continue, but somehow my throat made up its mind to swallow – though I can’t think what I was swallowing, unless it was a little knot of emotion I pushed back down because there was no room in my face for any more.
I didn’t say to act dead. I said act helpless.
Autobiography, if there really is such a thing, is like asking a rabbit to tell us what he looks like hopping through the grasses of the field. How would he know? If we want to hear about the field on the other hand, no one is in a better circumstance to tell us-so long as we keep in mind that we are missing all those things the rabbit was in no position to observe.
I cannot tell you what it is that guides us in this life; but for me, I fell toward the Chairman just as a stone must fall toward the earth. When I cut my lip and met Mr. Tanaka, when my mother died and I was cruelly sold, it was all like a stream that falls over rocky cliffs before it can reach the ocean. Even now that he is gone I have him still, in the richness of my memories.
Whatever our struggles and triumphs, however we may suffer them, all too soon they bleed into a wash, just like watery ink on paper.
This humble person has been alive long enough to see two generations of children grow up, and knows how rare it is for ordinary birds to give birth to a swan. The swan who goes on living in its parents’ tree will die; this is why those who are beautiful and talented bear the burden of finding their own way into the world.
Even now that he is gone I have him still, in the richness of my memories. I’ve lived my life again just telling it to you.
Every time I caught a glimpse of myself in the glass of a shop, I felt I was someone to be taken seriously; not a girl anymore, but a young woman.
He stood with his two frail hands on his cane and his eyes closed, and breathed in deeply the scent of the past. “Sometimes,” he sighed, “I think the things I remember are more real than the things I see.
A woman living in a grand house may pride herself on all her lovely things; but the moment she hears the crackle of fire she decides very quickly which are the few she values the most.
People in the village often said she ought to have been extremely attractive, because her parents had been. Well, a peach has a lovely taste and so does a mushroom, but you can’t put the two together; this was the terrible trick nature had played on her.
I learned that year that nothing is so unpredictable as who will survive a war and who won’t.
I had the sudden insight that nothing in life is ever as simple as we imagine.
My existence was as unstable as a stream, changing in every way; but the moth was like a piece of stone, changing not at all.
Sadness was a very heavy thing. My body weighed twice what it had only a moment earlier.
I lived in that contented state a long while before I was finally able to look back and admit how desolate my life had once been. I’m sure I could never have told my story otherwise; I don’t think any of us can speak frankly about pain until we are no longer enduring it.
We human beings are only part of something much larger. When we walk along we may crush a battle or simply cause a change in the air so that a fly ends up where it might not have gone otherwise. And if we think of the same example but with ourselves in the role of the insect, and the larger universe in the role we’ve just played, it’s perfectly clear that we’re affected every day by races over which we have no control than the poor beetle has over our gigantic foot as it descends upon it.