59 Quotes by Murasaki Shikibu

Ceaseless as the interminable voices of the bell-cricket, all night till dawn my tears flow.

People make a great deal of the flowers of spring and the leaves of autumn, but for me a night like this, with a clear moon shining on snow, is the best -- and there is not a trace of color in it. I cannot describe the effect it has on me, weird and unearthly somehow. I do not understand people who find a winter evening forbidding.

No art or learning is to be pursued halfheartedly...and any art worth learning will certainly reward more or less generously the effort made to study it.

It is very unkind of you to feel this way. Any woman should properly yield, it seems to me, even a complete stranger, because that is the way of the world.... All I desire is solace from the flood of memories that overwhelms me.

You are here to remind me of someone I long for, and what is it you long for yourself? We must have been together in an earlier life, you and I.

Remember "the unmoored boat floats about.

It is so rare to find someone of true understanding; for the most part they judge purely by their own standards and ignore everyone else. So all they see of me is a façade. There are times when I am forced to sit with them and on such occasions I simply ignore their petty criticisms, not because I am particularly shy but because I consider it pointless. As a result, they now look down upon me as a dullard.

i wish you could understand me, but of course it is not the way of this world that we are ever completely understood.

Did not we vow that we would neither of us be either before or after the other even in travelling the last journey of life? And can you find it in your heart to leave me now?