“The ancients waited for cherry blossoms, grieved when they were gone, and lamented their passing in countless poems. How very ordinary the poems had seemed to Sachiko when she read them as a girl, but now she knew, as well as one could know, that grieving over fallen cherry blossoms was more than a fad or convention.”

“I cannot pretend that I understood my mother at the end of her life. I was trying to follow the goals she had set me even though she had rejected them for herself. I took the following to be her death poem: Why do we suffer so in the world? Just regard life as the short bloom of the mountain cherry. Over the years, my opinion of this poem changed. At first I considered it another lament in the pessimistic mode she so often adopted. Then one day I realized it was actually joyous, and my entire understanding of her was transformed. In the end she had no more sorrow than does a cherry blossom at its falling.”

“Look at the cherry blossoms!Their color and scent fall with them,Are gone forever,Yet mindlessThe spring comes again.”

“In the cherry blossom's shadethere's no such thingas a stranger.”

“The work of preservation demands that the feelings playing about in one's guts not be turned into action. Just watch their passing like cherry blossoms.”

“What a strange thing!to be alivebeneath cherry blossoms.”