A mouse who wishes to fool the cat doesn’t simply scamper out of its hole whenever it feels the slightest urge.
The prettiest of them all is a girl who is pretty on the inside.
Sadness was a very heavy thing.
Passion can quickly slip to jealousy, or even hatred.
Nothing is as bleak as the future, except the past.
My tears simply broke through the fragile wallthat had held them, and with a terrible feeling of shame, I laid my head upon the table and let them drain out of me.
A memoir provides a record not so much of the memoirist as of the memoirist’s world.
Memoirs give the knowledge about the author and his environment. They are different from biography. Memoirs do not get ahead, and the man who writes a biography looks at his future like at a very simple thing.
It’s less a matter of looking the other way than of closing our eyes to what we can’t stop from happening.
We human beings have a remarkable way of growing accustomed to things.
As an American man of the 1990s writing about a Japanese woman of the 1930s, I needed to cross three cultural divides – man to woman, American to Japanese, and present to past.
You know, the men go to tea houses with the expectation that they will have a nice quiet evening and not read about it the next morning in the newspaper.
His face was very heavily creased, and into each crease he had tucked some worry or other, so that it wasn’t really his face any longer, but more like a tree that had nests of birds in all of the branches. He had to struggle constantly to manage it and always looked worn out from the effort.
You seemed so desperate, like you might drown if someone didn’t save you.
I began to feel that all the people I’d ever known who had died or left me had not in fact gone away, but continued to live on inside me just as this man’s wife lived on inside him.
Friendship is a precious thing, Sayuri. One mustn’t throw it away.
Flowers that grow where old ones have withered serve to remind us that death will one day come to us all.
All at once I felt so vain, like a girl posturing for the crowds as she walks along, only to discover the street is empty.
What an unbearable sorrow it would be, to realized I’d never really tasted to things I’d eaten, or seen the places I’d been. What life would I have? I would be like the dancer who had practiced since childhood for a performance she would never give.
Every man has his destiny. But who needs to go to a fortune-teller to find it? Do I go to a chef to find out if I’m hungry?