Who wins, you or the sony? The sony, I answered, or how would I ever improve? So winners, Hae-Joo proposed, are the real losers because they learn nothing? What, then, are losers? Winners?

Uzaemon is no longer surprised by Shuzai's perspicacity. I don't know if I have the right to involve you.To a believer in Fate, replies Shuzai, it's not you who is involving me.

... I thought, I am in this world, but no longer of this world.

Siddhartha is a dead man and a living ideal. The man taught about overcoming pain, and influencing one's future reincarnations. But I pray to the ideal.

I watched clouds awobbly from the floor o' that kayak. Souls cross ages like clouds cross skies, an' tho' a cloud's shape nor hue nor size don't stay the same, it's still a cloud an' so is a soul. Who...

Three or four times only in my youth did I glimpse the Joyous Isles, before they were lost to fogs, depressions, cold fronts, ill winds, and contrary tides … I mistook them for adulthood. Assuming...

Acting like an insider can be enough to be one.

The pieces fell into place. I fell into pieces.

To kill what you'd cherish & cure," he opined, "that seems to be the way of things.

Wars do not combust without warning. They begin as little fires over the horizon. Wars approach. A wise man watches for the smoke, and prepares to vacate the neighborhood, just like Ayrs and Jocasta....

Albert Camus, from Leonard Cohen's reading list, makes an appearance here, from Notebooks, 1935–1951: What gives value to travel is fear. It is the fact that, at a certain moment, when we are so far...

When a parent dies, a filing cabinet full of all the fascinating stuff also ceases to exist.

Wrong turns teach us the right way.

Spring adds, summer multiplies, autumn subtracts, winter divides.

We create models to explain nature, but the models wind up gatecrashing nature and driving away the original inhabitants.

Eavesdropping's sort of thrilling 'cause you learn what people really think, but eavesdropping makes you miserable for exactly the same reason.

The song instantly insisted it'd never existed.

Green is made of yellow and blue, nothing else, but when you look at green, where've the yellow and the blue gone? Somehow this is to do with Moran's dad. Somehow this is to do with everyone and...

Sunlight bent around the world, lending fragile color to wildflowers.

Self pity, Orito reminds herself yet again, is a noose dangling from a rafter.

I consider how you don't get to choose whom you're attracted to, you only get to wonder about it retrospectively.

The mind abhors a vacancy & is wont to people it with phantoms.

We are both busy people, so let's cut the small talk.

Torturous advances won over generations can be lost by a single stroke of a myopic president's pen or a vainglorious general's sword.

The weak are meat the strong do eat.

Time is what stops history happening at once; time is the speed at which the past disappears.

We looked at each other for the last time; nothing is as eloquent as nothing.

We are only what we know, and I wished to be so much more than I was, sorely.

Truth is singular. Its 'versions' are mistruths.

Unlimited power in the hands of limited people always leads to cruelty.