There's no backward and no forward, no day other than this. You fill your cart as you go, and that's that.

Along the wide curving moat surrounding the palace, rows of cherry trees announced the end of their seasonal beauty. Some of the trees were weeping: blossoms in white and palest pink, ponderous with decreptitude, eddying on the brown water, stirred by the paddling of ducks.

that a child is not an event, alleged or otherwise, a mistake or accident or crime. . . he is by definition more than this, sum rather than division, a living promissory note.

Men had suddenly become a scarce commodity, if not quite as sought after as rice.

Because it was the endless wanting that would break you, I thought. The constant craving for a love that might never be fulfilled that would bring you low, bit by bit, until one day you'd no longer be able to recognize any part of yourself.