No one knows the author of memoir so well like himself.
And when I raised myself to look at the man who'd spoken, I had a feeling of leaving my misery behind me there on the stone wall.
A mouse who wishes to fool the cat doesn't simply scamper out of its hole whenever it feels the slightest urge.
The prettiest of them all is a girl who is pretty on the inside.
Sadness was a very heavy thing.
We can never flee the misery that is within us.
I studied Japanese language and culture in college and graduate school, and afterward went to work in Tokyo, where I met a young man whose father was a famous businessman and whose mother was a geisha. He and I never discussed his parentage, which was an open secret, but it fascinated me.
A memoir provides a record not so much of the memoirist as of the memoirist's world.
Memoirs give the knowledge about the author and his environment. They are different from biography. Memoirs do not get ahead, and the man who writes a biography looks at his future like at a very simple thing.
We human beings have a remarkable way of growing accustomed to things.
I could no more have stopped myself from feeling that sadness than you could stop yourself from smelling an apple that has been cut open on the table before you.
The corridor couldn't have smelled more strongly of fish guts if we had actually been inside a fish.
You know, the men go to tea houses with the expectation that they will have a nice quiet evening and not read about it the next morning in the newspaper.
His face was very heavily creased, and into each crease he had tucked some worry or other, so that it wasn't really his face any longer, but more like a tree that had nests of birds in all of the branches. He had to struggle constantly to manage it and always looked worn out from the effort.
I've lived my life again just telling it to you.
In the instant before the door opened, I could almost sense my life expanding just like a river whose waters have begun to swell; for I had never before taken such a drastic step to change the course of my own future. I was like a child tiptoeing along a precipice overlooking the sea. And yet somehow I hadn't imagined a great wave might come and strike me there, and wash everything away.
I was thanking him for...well, for something I'm not sure I can explain even now. For showing me that something besides cruelty could be found in the world, I suppose.
I cannot tell you what it is that guides us in this life; but for me, I fell toward the Chairman just as a stone must fall toward the earth. When I cut my lip and met Mr. Tanaka, when my mother died and I was cruelly sold, it was all like a stream that falls over rocky cliffs before it can reach the ocean. Even now that he is gone I have him still, in the richness of my memories.
I began to feel that all the people I'd ever known who had died or left me had not in fact gone away, but continued to live on inside me just as this man's wife lived on inside him.
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
Flowers that grow where old ones have withered serve to remind us that death will one day come to us all.
How many times already had I encountered the painful lesson that although we may wish for the barb to be pulled from our flesh, it leaves a welt that doesn't heal?
All at once I felt so vain, like a girl posturing for the crowds as she walks along, only to discover the street is empty.
Every man has his destiny. But who needs to go to a fortune-teller to find it? Do I go to a chef to find out if I'm hungry?
My feelings of disgust had been so loud within me, they’d nearly drowned out everything else.
Follow AzQuotes on Facebook, Twitter and Google+. Every day we present the best quotes! Improve yourself, find your inspiration, share with friends
or simply: