“No, everything was new now, just waiting to be discovered. And she would ... She was hungry for it, she would stuff the whole world into her mouth and bite down.”

“I could get drunk just smelling you,' he whispered in her ear. 'You always smell like home.”

“It was as if her mother and aunt had been snatched away by goblins and replaced with fairies of some sort. They looked so beautiful to her, and so different… They could have said anything, and she would have loved them.”

“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.”

“The ultimate measure of a person is not her mistakes or accomplishments, but what she does with them.”

“There are people out there who have x-ray vision. They can see through my walls, armor and scrims and filters right down to the real me. And the saddest thing in the world? I haven't forgotten who that person is. She's on there and waiting. Like sleeping beauty locked high in a tower, she's been patient and aware of the coma I've been in all these years. I realise the one hitch in having x-ray glasses is that I'm utterly exposed to him. It's one thing to want someone to keep looking, to swim over moats and dodge flaming arrows to find you. It's quite another when you ask yourself, really ask yourself, if you're finally ready to come out into the open. No matter what.”

“I realized that when we finally reached Miyako, I would be stepping into a new life and would have to stop thinking about Ming-gwok. I imagined a small lacquered box inlaid with silver and gold in a pattern of curling waves, inset with silver cranes. Into this imaginary box I placed all my memories of Ming-gwok and secretly tucked it away in my heart.”