Every Good Friday, this anchored but ever-changing anniversary of my accident, I go to the little creek that saved my life and light one more candle. I offer thanks for two facts: that I am one year older, and that I am one year closer to death.
Coincidentally, a good age for a Japanese girl is younger than twenty five, because that’s when she turns into a ‘Christmas Cake’. Christmas cakes, as everyone knows, are desirable before the twenty fifth but afterward quickly become stale and are put on the shelf.
Just as I was beginning my drift into unconsciousness, there was an explosion. Not a movie explosion but a small real-life explosion, like the ignition of an unhappy gas oven that holds a grudge against its owner.
That which abides the fire shall become clean. The water of separation shall purify. The Lord is a consuming fire. That which can’t abide the fire shall go through water.
If you cannot love the pain, you can at least love the lessons it teaches.
Perhaps there are just some things you leave behind when you choose a new life.
Love is as strong as death, as hard as hell.
Everything burns if the flame is hot enough. The world is nothing but a crucible.
I envy all suffering, because suffering is necessary to become spiritually beautiful.
Who would have guessed that the monster of fraud was a democracy?
The true master knows that if he had a God he could understand, he would never hold Him to be God.
Things should be judged by distance traveled rather than by current position.
With every fragment of rock that fall from me, I can hear the voice of Marianne Engle. I love you. Aishiteru. Ego amo te. Ti amo. Eg elska pig. Ich liebe dich. It is moving across time, coming to me in every language of the world, and it sounds like pure love.
All history is just one man trying to take something away from another man, and usually it doesn’t really belong to either of them.
I am not a hero in soul and never will be, but I am better than I was before. Or so I tell myself; and for now that is enough.
That which is painful sharpens one’s love.
It doesn’t matter how fast you move, I learned, if you never go anywhere.
Vanity is both a great motivator and a great deceiver.
Love is an action you must repeat ceaselessly.
Heaven is an idea constructed by man to help him cope with the fact that life on earth is both brutally short and, paradoxically, far too long.
Only a man unable to handle the actual world would create another one in which to hide.