Nothing is as bleak as the future, except the past.

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

We lead our lives like water flowing down a hill, going more or less in one direction until we splash into something that forces us to find a new course.

By the time we arrived, as evening was approaching, I felt as sore as a rock must feel when the waterfall has pounded on it all day long.

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

After all, when a stone is dropped into a pond, the water continues quivering even after the stone has sunk to the bottom.

I don't think any of us can speak frankly about pain until we are no longer enduring it.

We don't become geisha because we want our lives to be happy; we become geisha because we have no choice.

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

A tree may look as beautiful as ever; but when you notice the insects infesting it, and the tips of the branches that are brown from disease, even the trunk seems to lose some of its magnificence.

If you aren't the woman I think you are, then this isn't the world I thought it was.

I'm not a vegetarian because I love animals, I'm a vegetarian because I hate plants.

Readers, not critics, are the people who determine a book's eventual fate.

But your perfectly good bed doesn’t come with a blanket of stars.

If security were all that mattered, computers would never be turned on, let alone hooked into a network with literally millions of potential intruders

My dad used to say, 'You wouldn't worry so much about what people thought about you if you knew how seldom they did.

We all experience power struggles in our lives - at the workplace, with our friends, in our love lives. In a way, we're all politicians.

The abuse of women and girls is the most pervasive and unaddressed human right violation on earth.

I just try to live the right way the best I can. I make plenty of mistakes but I just try to do the best I can and be a great example for my kids.

Even if one's head were to be suddenly cut off, he should be able to do one more action with certainty.

The true joy of a moonlit night is something we no longer understand. Only the men of old, when there were no lights, could understand the true joy of a moonlit night.