Every man has his destiny. But who needs to go to a fortune-teller to find it? Do I go to a chef to find out if I'm hungry?.

The swan who goes on living in its parents' tree will die; this is why those who are beautiful and talented bear the burden of finding their own way ….

Sometimes," he sighed, "I think the things I remember are more real than the things I see..

A memoir provides a record not so much of the memoirist as of the memoirist's world..

A geisha has studied a man's moods and his seasons. She fusses and he blooms..

How many times already had I encountered the painful lesson that although we may wish for the barb to be pulled from our flesh, it leaves a welt that….

When we fight upstream against a rocky undercurrent, every foothold takes on a kind of urgency..

His face was very heavily creased, and into each crease he had tucked some worry or other, so that it wasn't really his face any longer, but more lik….

I went back to those graves not long afterward and found as I stood there that sadness was a very heavy thing. My body weighed twice what it had only….

Hopes are like hair ornaments. Girls want to wear too many of them. When they become old women they look silly wearing even one..

It's less a matter of looking the other way than of closing our eyes to what we can't stop from happening..

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

Never give up; for even rivers someday wash dams away..

A wounded tiger is a dangerous beast..

Anyone can have a good day. The question is what do you do on a bad day. That's when you're being tested. In a very tangible sense, a bad day shows y….

I worried she might spend an afternoon chatting with me about the sights and then wish me best of luck..

We human beings have a remarkable way of growing accustomed to things..

At that moment, beauty itself struck me as a kind of painful melancholy..

And then I became aware of all the magnificent silk wrapped around my body, and had the feeling I might drown in beauty. At that moment, beauty itsel….

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.

I stumbled out into the courtyard to try to flee my misery, but of course we can never flee the misery that is within us..