The very idea!” he said, with another big laugh. “You, growing up in a dump like Yoroido. That’s like making tea in a bucket!
If he couldn’t forgive you for what you’d done, it was clear to me he was never truly your destiny.
I understood that he left me at the end of his long life just as naturally as the leaves fall from the trees.
When I said these words, all the heat in my body seemed to rise to my face. I felt I might float up into the air, just like a piece of ash from a fire.
Since the day I’d left Yoroido, I’d done nothing but worry that every turn of life’s wheel would bring yet another obstacle into my path; and of course, it was the worrying and the struggle that had always made life so vividly real to me.
Never give up; for even rivers someday wash dams away.
I don’t think any of us can speak frankly about pain until we are no longer enduring it.
My mother once told me I was like water. Water can carve its way even through stone. And when trapped, water makes a new path.
When we fight upstream against a rocky undercurrent, every foothold takes on a kind of urgency.
Grief is a most peculiar thing; we’re so helpless in the face of it. It’s like a window that will simply open of its own accord. The room grows cold, and we can do nothing but shiver. But it opens a little less each time, and a little less; and one day we wonder what has become of it.
I stumbled out into the courtyard to try to flee my misery, but of course we can never flee the misery that is within us.
I will think of you every time I need to be reminded that there is beauty and goodness in the world.
Even stone can be worn down with enough rain.
For a flicker of a moment I imagined a world completely different from the one I’d always known, a world in which I was treated with fairness, even kindness – a world in which fathers didn’t sell their daughters.
After all, when a stone is dropped into a pond, the water continues quivering even after the stone has sunk to the bottom.
Perhaps it seems odd that a casual meeting on the street could have brought about such change. But sometimes life is like that isn’t it.
A tree may look as beautiful as ever; but when you notice the insects infesting it, and the tips of the branches that are brown from disease, even the trunk seems to lose some of its magnificence.
Hopes are like hair ornaments. Girls want to wear too many of them. When they become old women they look silly wearing even one.
Now I know that our world is no more permanent than a wave rising on the ocean. Whatever our struggles and triumphs, however we may suffer them, all too soon they bleed into a wash, just like watery ink on paper.
Anyone can have a good day. The question is what do you do on a bad day. That’s when you’re being tested. In a very tangible sense, a bad day shows your innermost essence more than a good day.