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

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 was in the supermarket the other day, and I met a lady in the aisle where they keep the generic brands. Her name was 'woman.

A voice flat enough to fit under a door crack.

Who's my hero? That's a great question... Well, I think my dad is my hero, because he's someone I look up to every day.

I grew up in a household where reading was encouraged. My mother believed in the power of words, and my father obviously did too.

To me, there's two kinds of music these days. There's ephemeral music, and there's music that has lasting power and depth.

The average ground temperature of the Earth is impossible to measure since most of the Earth is ocean...So this average ground temperature is a fiction.

We can do without butter, but, despite all our love of peace, not without arms. One cannot shoot with butter, but with guns.

The Celts were fearless warriors because they wish to inculcate this as one of their leading tenets, that souls do not become extinct, but pass after death from one body to another.

All men are naturally included to obscure the morally ambiguous element in their political cause by investing it with religious sanctity.

I also know Patrick White in Australia, both personally and as a writer, and Salman Rushdie in India.