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.

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People have separated from each other with walls of concrete that blocked the roads to connection and love. and Nature has been defeated in the name of development.

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It's remarkable how we go on year after year, doing the same old things. We get tired and bored, and ask when they'll come for us

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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.

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

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

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The true joy of a moonlit night is something we no longer understand. Only the men of old, when there were no lights, could understand the true joy of a moonlit night.

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Does pain go away and leave no trace, then?’ ‘You sometimes even feel sentimental for it.

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Because you cannot see him, God is everywhere.

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The woman was silent, her eyes on the floor. Shimamura had come to a point where he knew he was only parading his masculine shamelessness, and yet it seemed likely enough that the woman was familiar with the failing and need not be shocked by it. He looked at her. Perhaps it was the rich lashes of the downcast eyes that made her face seem warm and sensuous. She shook her head very slightly, and again a faint blush spread over her face.

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