Thousand Cranes

Does pain go away and leave no trace, then?’ ‘You sometimes even feel sentimental for it.

Now, even more than the evening before, he could think of no one with whom to compare her. She had become absolute, beyond comparison. She had become decision and fate.

You've always been fond of understanding people too well." "They should arrange not to be understood quite so easily.

In a gourd that had been handed down for three centuries, a flower that would fade in a morning.

Your mother was such a gentle person. I always feel when I see someone like her that I'm watching the last flowers fall. This is no world for gentle people.

He could not call up the faces of his own mother and father, who had died three or four years before. He would look at a picture, and there they would be. Perhaps people were progressively harder to paint in the mind as they near one, loved by one. Perhaps clear memories came easily in proportion as they were ugly.

Anyway, it’s hardly a problem worth worrying about.

Father's life was only a very small part of the life of a tea bowl.