“Diogenes carried a bowl with him for years, but one day saw a man drinking from his cupped palm and declared, ‘I have been a fool, burdened all these years by the weight of a bowl when a perfectly good vessel lay at the end of my wrist.”

“I now saw, with great dismay, that what I had been carrying all this time was not a bowl but a book. This ruined everything.”

“The years of her life tumbled out onto the floor like marbles that she would never be able to gather up again in one bowl. The years of her life had been a made puzzle that one day gets unmade, the pieces all scattered.”

“With lacquerware there is an extra beauty in that moment between removing the lid and lifting the bowl to the mouth, when one gazes at the still, silent liquid in the dark depths of the bowl, its colour hardly differing from that of the bowl itself. What lies within the darkness one cannot distinguish, but the palm senses the gentle movements of the liquid, vapour rises from within, forming droplets on the rim, and the fragrance carried upon the vapour brings a delicate anticipation ... a moment of mystery, it might almost be called, a moment of trance.”

“I thought of the bowl of water my mother taught me to look into. It was true, everything a person ever needed to know was right there in a single bowl small enough to fit in the palm of one hand.”

“We came around the corner and stood in the doorway of what looked like a paint-testing ground. This was where we proved once and for all that we were good loving parents. We decided to let him live."What is painting doing in my best Tupperware bowl?" I yelled."Well, I needed something lightweight I could carry around with me," he began."You've been carrying around a brain for year," the boy's father said.”