The heart dies a slow death, shedding each hope like leaves... - Arthur Golden, Memoirs of a Geisha

"Of course, a sign doesn't mean anything unless you know how to interpret it."

"And when I raised myself to look at the man who’d spoken, I had a feeling of leaving my misery behind me there on the stone wall."

"I began to feel that all the people I'd ever known who had died or left me had not in fact gone away, but continued to live on inside me just as this man's wife lived on inside him."

"Flowers that grow where old ones have withered serve to remind us that death will one day come to us all."

"Hopes are like hair ornaments. Girls want to wear too many of them. When they become old women they look silly wearing even one."