Quotes About Reflection

Children retain a great deal, and when they grow up they start going over things and rejudging them from a grownup's point of view. This must have been this way, and that was that way, they say. That's why you have to be careful with children—some day they grow up.

I know few greater pleasures than holding a lacquer soup bowl in my hands, feeling upon my palms the weight of the liquid and its mild warmth. The sensation is something like that of holding a plump newborn baby.

To Yukiko, however, drawn as she was to the past, there was something very unsatisfactory about this brother in law, and she was sure that from his grave her father too was reproaching Tatsuo.

And I got to thinking about the moral meaning of memory, per se. And what it means to forget, what it means to fail to find and preserve the connection with the dead whose lives you, or I, want or need to honor with our own.

sitting happiness in...

Here it seemed that even shocking deaths were like a stone being dropped into a pond where the splash and the ripple closed over into stillness in no time.

Those touched-up images were not what her mirrors had been telling her for some time.

Can it be, I wondered, that life without her is so dull as this?

The great sadness cleansed me of the foul elements that had accumulated in my heart and body.

The parlor may have its charms, but the Japanese toilet truly is a place of spiritual repose.

Modern man, in his well-lit house, knows nothing of the beauty of gold; but those who lived in the dark houses of the past were not merely captivated by its beauty, they also knew its practical value; for gold, in these dim rooms, must have served the function of a reflector. Their use of gold leaf and gold dust was not mere extravagance. Its reflective properties were put to use as a source of illumination.

Pero cuando, sustituidas éstas (las lámparas eléctricas con pantalla de papel) por los candelabros, de luz todavía más tenue, se observan las bandejas y boles bajo el parpadeo de la trémula llama, se descubre cómo el brillo de todos esos objetos lacados, hondo y espeso como las aguas de un estanque, va revistiéndose de un encanto completamente diferente al que había mostrado hasta entonces.

And that's when I know it's over. As soon as you start thinking about the beginning, it's the end.

But if these years have taught me anything it is this: you can never run away. Not ever. The only way out is in.

She was the kind of girlfriend God gives you young, so you'll know loss the rest of your life.

You can't regret the life you didn't lead.

Well, first I would ask them if they had read the Bible; then I would ask them if they had understood it.

But I know, I know my death will not kill me. Rather it is the death of others that will kill me.

Festina lente. You know what that means? Hurry slowly. Bene. He smiled. -A Good & Happy Child

Clinging to one's outward appearance interferes with living.

The torment of imprisonment lies in not being able to escape from oneself at any time.

Unable to suspect others, unable to believe in others, one would to live in a suspended state, a state of bankrupt human relations, as if one were looking into a mirror that reflects nothing.

There are all kinds of life, and sometimes the other side of the hill looks greener. What's hardest for me is not knowing what living like this will ever come to.

While he mused on the effect of the flowing sands, he was seized from time to time by hallucinations in which he himself began to move with the flow.