“Some element in the air between us changed, as though a wind that had been blowing gently had come to an abrupt stillness.”

“A garden is composed of a variety of clocks, Aritomo had once told me. Some of them run faster than the others, and some of them move slower than wee can ever perceive. I only understood this fully long after I had been his apprentice.”

“The world goes by, the young and the hopeful, all head for their future. Where does that leave us? There is a misconception that we have reached our destinations the moment we grow old, but it is not a well-accepted fact that we are still travelling towards those destinations, still beyond our reach even on the day we close our eyes for the final time.”

“A raintree bent towards a window in one side of the bungalow, eavesdropping on the conversations that had taken place inside over years.”

“It is getting dark. In the low mists over the hills, an orange glow broods, as if the trees are on fire. Bats are flooding out from the hundreds of caves that perforate these mountainsides. I watch them plunge into the mists without any hesitation, trusting in the echoes and silences in which they fly.Are all of us the same, I wonder, navigating our lives by interpreting the silences between words spoken, analyzing the returning echoes of our memory in order to chart the terrain, in order to make sense of the world around us?”

“Memories I had locked away have begun to break free, like shards of ice fracturing off an arctic shelf. In sleep, these broken floes drift toward the morning light of remembrance.”

“Moments in time when the world is changing bring out the best and the worst in people.”