No, I don't want your money. The world moves less by money than by what you owe people and what they owe you. I don't like to owe anybody anything, so I keep to myself as much on the lending side as I can.

The better you were able to imagine what you wanted to imagine, the farther you could flee from reality.

From the moment of my birth, I lived with pain at the center of my life. My only purpose in life was to find a way to coexist with intense pain.

I was living for one thing only, and that was to confirm my own lack of feeling.

Listening to the music while stretching her body close to its limit, she was able to attain a mysterious calm. She was simultaneously the torturer and the tortured, the forcer and the forced. This sense of inner-directed self-sufficiency was what she wanted most of all. It gave her deep solace.

朝の早い時刻に、まだ何も描かれていない真っ白なキャンバスをただじっと眺めるのが昔から好きだった。私はそれを個人的に「キャンバス禅」と名付けていた。まだ何も描かれていないけれど、そこにあるのは決して空白ではない。その真っ白な画面には、来るべきものがひっそり姿を隠している。目を凝らすといくつもの可能性がそこにあり、それらがやがてひとつの有効な手がかりへと集約されていく。そのような瞬間が好きだった。存在と非存在が混じり合っていく瞬間だ。

From the girl who sat before me now...surged a fresh and physical life force. She was like a small animal that has popped into the world with the coming of spring. Her eyes moved like an independent organism with joy, laughter, anger, amazement, and despair. I hadn't seen a face so vivid and expressive in ages, and I enjoyed watching it live and move.

Sometimes fate is like a small sandstorm that keeps changing directions. You change direction but the sandstorm chases you. You turn again, but the storm adjusts. Over and over you play this out, like some ominous dance with death just before dawn. Why? Because this storm isn't some­ thing that blew in from far away, something that has nothing to do with you. This storm is you. Something inside of you.

Not that we were incompatible: we just had nothing to talk about.