It was what we Japanese called the onion life, peeling away a layer at a time and crying all the while.
I worried she might spend an afternoon chatting with me about the sights and then wish me best of luck.
Well, a peach has a lovely taste and so does a mushroom, but you can't put the two together.
A wounded tiger is a dangerous beast.
It's less a matter of looking the other way than of closing our eyes to what we can't stop from happening.
Water is powerful. It can wash away earth, put out fire, and even destroy iron.
Here again, I saw life in all its noisy excitement passing me by.
Time your actions so you're not fighting against the currents but moving with them.
It's your duty to use what influence you have, unless you want to drift through life like a fish belly-up on the stream" "I wish I could believe that life really is something more than a stream that carries us along, belly-up" "Alright, if it's a stream, you're still free to be in this part of it or that part, aren't you? The water will divide again and again. If you bump, and tussle, and fight, and make use of whatever advantages you might have-" "Oh, that's fine, I'm sure, when you have advantages." "You'd find them everywhere, if you ever bothered to look!
Seeing him again after so long awakened something inside me. I was surprised to find myself feeling sad rather than joyful, as I would have imagined.
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.
And when I raised myself to look at the man who'd spoken, I had a feeling of leaving my misery behind me there on the stone wall.
The corridor couldn't have smelled more strongly of fish guts if we had actually been inside a fish.
I could no more have stopped myself from feeling that sadness than you could stop yourself from smelling an apple that has been cut open on the table before you.
We human beings have a remarkable way of growing accustomed to things.
A memoir provides a record not so much of the memoirist as of the memoirist's world.
I studied Japanese language and culture in college and graduate school, and afterward went to work in Tokyo, where I met a young man whose father was a famous businessman and whose mother was a geisha. He and I never discussed his parentage, which was an open secret, but it fascinated me.
We can never flee the misery that is within us.
I was thanking him for...well, for something I'm not sure I can explain even now. For showing me that something besides cruelty could be found in the world, I suppose.
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.
Those of us with water in our personalities don't pick where we'll flow to. All we can do is flow where the landscape of our lives carries us
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?
How many times already had I encountered the painful lesson that although we may wish for the barb to be pulled from our flesh, it leaves a welt that doesn't heal?
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.
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