- I went back to those graves not long afterward and found as I stood there that sadness was a very heavy thing. My body weighted twice what it had only a moment earlier, as if those graves were pulling me down toward them.
- But being sent out into the world isn't necessarily the same as leaving your home behind you.
- 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.
- While I waited in the wings, I had the peculiar feeling that the weight of the entire building was pressing down on me–because of course, sadness has always seemed to me an oddly heavy thing.
- "Neither you nor I can know your destiny. You may never know it! Destiny isn't always like a party at the end of the evening. Sometimes it's nothing more than struggling through life from day to day."
- "Young girls hope all sorts of foolish things, Sayuri. Hopes are like hair ornaments. Girls want to wear too many of them. When they become old women they look silly wearing even one."
- An en is a karmic bond lasting a lifetime. Nowadays many people seem to believe their lives are entirely a mater of choice; but in my day we viewed ourselves as pieces of clay that forever show the fingerprints of everyone who has touched them.
- There's nothing like work for getting over a disappointment.
- "Sayuri," he said to me, "I don't know when we will see each other again or what the world will be like when we do. We may both have seen many horrible things. But I will think of you every time I need to be reminded that there is beauty and goodness in the world."
- Adversity is like a strong wind. I don't mean just that it holds us back from places we might otherwise go. It also tears away from us all but the things that cannot be torn, so that afterward we see ourselves as we really are, and not merely as we might like to be.
- From this experience I understood the danger of focusing only on what isn't there. What if I came to the end of my life and realized that I'd spent every day watching for a man who would never come to me? What an unbearable sorrow it would be, to realize I'd never really tasted the things I'd eaten, or seen the places I'd been, because I'd thought of nothing but the Chairman even while my life was drifting away from me.
- "Yes, well, we needn't talk about that. Sometimes we get through adversity only by imagining what the world might be like if our dreams should ever come true."
- "What I did on Amami, I did because of my feelings for you, Chairman. Every step I have taken in my life since I was a child in Gion, I have taken in the hope of bringing myself closer to you."
- 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.
- I don't think any of us can speak frankly about pain until we are no longer enduring it.
- Even now that he is gone I have him still, in the richness of my memories.
- But 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.
jun 13 2015 ∞
aug 5 2015 +
aug 5 2015 +