“Flowers that grow where old ones have withered serve to remind us that death will one day come to us all.”

“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”

“The heart dies a slow death, shedding each hope like leaves until one day there are none. No hopes. Nothing remains.”

“I knew even then that she was right. An en is a karmic bond lasting a lifetime. Nowadays many people seem to believe their lives are entirely a matter of choice; but in my day we viewed ourselves as pieces of clay that forever show the fingerprints of everyone who has touched them. Nobu's touch had made a deeper impression on me than most. No one could tell me whether he would be my ultimate destiny, but I had always sensed the en between us. Somewhere in the landscape of my life Nobu would always be present. But could it really be that of all the lessons I'd learned, the hardest one lay just ahead of me? Would I really have to take each of my hopes and put them away where no one would ever see them again, where not even I would ever see them?”

“Autobiography, if there really is such a thing, is like asking a rabbit to tell us what he looks like hopping through the grasses of the field. How would he know? If we want to hear about the field on the other hand, no one is in a better circumstance to tell us-so long as we keep in mind that we are missing all those things the rabbit was in no position to observe. ”

“We all know that a winter scene, though it may be covered one day, with even the trees dressed in shawls of snow, will be unrecognizable the following spring.”

“We lead our lives like water flowing down a hill, going more or less in one direction until we splash into something that forces us to find a new course.”