Quotes from Murasaki Shikibu

How strange a thing is the heart of man!

A night of endless dreams, inconsequent and wild, is this my life; none more worth telling than the rest.

Stepmothers in books usually behave very spitefully towards the children entrusted to them. But he was now learning by his own experience that in real life this does not always happen.

Autumn is no time to lie alone

Old age is a disease from which there is no recovery but the old nun's recent attack had certainly been brought on chiefly by the fatigue of so much travelling.

The memories of long love gather like drifting snow, poignant as the mandarin ducks who float side by side in sleep.

In few people is discretion stronger than the desire to tell a good story.

The number of those who have nothing to recommend them and of those in whom nothing but good can be found is probably equal

No penance can your hard heart find save such as you long since have taught me to endure

What need have I for a palace? Rather to lie with you where the weeds grow thick.

Even those people who have no sorrow of their own often feel melancholy from the circumstances in which they are placed.

in the mountains the cherry trees were in full bloom, and the farther he went, the lovelier the veils of mist became, until for him, whose rank so restricted travel that all this was new, the landscape became a source of wonder.

En asuntos de arte la modestia no es una virtud.

When in my present lonely lot, I feel my past has not been free From sins which I remember not, I dread more, what to come, may be.

Did not we vow that we would neither of us be either before or after the other even in travelling the last journey of life? And can you find it in your heart to leave me now?

At a guess I see that you may indeed be he: the light silver dew brings to clothe in loveliness a twilight beauty flower.

i wish you could understand me, but of course it is not the way of this world that we are ever completely understood.

How much the more in judging of the human heart should we distrust all fashionable airs and graces, all tricks and smartness, learnt only to please the outward gaze

It is very unkind of you to feel this way. Any woman should properly yield, it seems to me, even a complete stranger, because that is the way of the world.... All I desire is solace from the flood of memories that overwhelms me.

And among the leaves were white flowers with petals half-unfolded like the lips of people smiling at their own thoughts.

When the young Prince turned three, the court observed the ceremony of the donning of his first trousers.

How is it that a little incident like this suddenly comes back to one, whereas something that moved one deeply at the time can simply be forgotten with the passage of the years?

Nothing can be well learned that is not agreeable to one's natural taste.

The dews that wet the tender grass, At the sun's birth, too quickly pass, Nor e'er can hope to see it rise In full perfection to the skies." Shiônagon, who now joined them, and heard the above distich, consoled the nun with the following:— "The dews will not so quickly pass, Nor shall depart before they see The full perfection of the grass, They loved so well in infancy.