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

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.

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

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

The heart dies a slow death, shedding each hope like leaves until one day there are none. No hopes. Nothing remains.

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.

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

Can't you see? Every step I have taken, since I was that child on the bridge, has been to bring myself closer to you.

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 itself struck me as a kind of painful melancholy.

At the temple there is a poem called "Loss" carved into the stone. It has three words, but the poet has scratched them out. You cannot read loss, only feel it.

Sometimes we get through adversity only by imagining what the world might be like if our dreams should ever come true.

When necessity speaks it demands.

Women on the streets want money when we meet. I take them for a little ride, chop, chop, chop.

One of the reasons we're here is to be a part of this process of exchange.

A mother's love is a blessing No matter where you roam. Keep her while you have her, You'll miss her when she's gone -- Angela's Ashes.

Love, the most generous passion of the mind The softest refuge innocence can find

Obviously people want social calm, but if you do not let clever and ingenious people to participate, obviously there must be some dormant volcano that will erupt, sooner or later.

Unless a picture shocks, it is nothing.

I was once that which you are, and what I am you will also be.

Our eyes reflect light. Better that the lips are more like a rose petal.

Knowing you have something good to read before bed is among the most pleasurable of sensations.