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

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.

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.

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

Prose: words in their best order

What matters is at the end of life, when you're about to pass into oblivion, that you've at least scratched 'Kilroy was here, ' on the last wall of the universe.

The best kind of comedy to me is when you make people laugh at things they’ve never laughed at, and also take a light into the darkened corners of people’s minds, exposing them to the light.

there wasn't use trying to talk with a girl just because of something she'd said to me in a dream

I'm the best there is, the best there was, and the best there ever will be.

Real life is to most men ... a perpetual compromise between the ideal and the possible.

Work backward from your goal.

O woman, born first to believe us; Yea, also born first to forget; Born first to betray and deceive us, Yet first to repent and regret.

O God, for as much as without Thee We are not enabled to doubt Thee, Help us all by Thy grace To convince the whole race It knows nothing whatever about Thee.

Can one serve God and one's nation in parliament?