A secret, if it's kept, can be sweet and comforting, but once it leaks out it can turn on you with a vengeance.

---

I wonder what the retirement age is in the novel business. The day you die.

---

I suppose even a woman's hatred is a kind of love.

---

Now, even more than the evening before, he could think of no one with whom to compare her. She had become absolute, beyond comparison. She had become decision and fate.

---

A child walked by, rolling a metal hoop that made a sound of autumn.

---

The road was frozen. The village lay quiet under the cold sky. Komako hitched up the skirt of her kimono and tucked it into her obi. The moon shone like a blade frozen in blue ice.

---

They were words that came out of nothing, but they seemed to him somehow significant. He muttered them over again.

---

The snow on the distant mountains was soft and creamy, as if veiled in a faint smoke.

---

A poetess who had died young of cancer had said in one of her poems that for her, on sleepless nights, 'the night offers toads and black dogs and corpses of the drowned.

---

The sound of the freezing of snow over the land seemed to roar deep into the earth. There was no moon. The stars, almost too many of them to be true, came forward so brightly that it was as if they were falling with the swiftness of the void. As the stars came nearer, the sky retreated deeper and deeper into the night color. The layers of the Border Range, indistinguishable one from another, cast their heaviness at the skirt of the starry sky in a blackness grave and somber enough to communicate their mass. The whole of the night scene came together in a clear, tranquil harmony.

---